Empirical Estimation of the Cost of Equity: An Application to Selected Brazilian Utilities Companies

We provide an extensive set of alternative models for the estimation of the real cost of equity in a sample of utilities firms in Brazil with monthly data from March 2006 to June 2011. The traditional CAPM is rejected, together with the Fama-French factors, due to a poor fit. Additional factors improve the fit of the models and the estimated betas and real cost of equity increase relative to the traditional CAPM and Fama-French models. Accounting for conditional heteroskedasticity shows that autocorrelation of variances is more important than news effects. The inclusion of higher order terms shows that the third order term is mostly significant and positive indicating preference for skewness in this sample period. Our estimates of betas and the implied predicted real cost of equity show that, across the best models, betas are significantly below unity in the range 0.26-0.73. The predicted real cost of equity, across the best models, for Brazil in this sector and sample period is in the range of 8.7% to 13.2% per year.