Despite the existence of a great number of books covering asset pricing issues at all levels there are few books especially dedicated to the valuation of firms that are not necessarily traded on the capital market. The new book by Kruschwitz and Loeffler adds to the latter group. In broad terms, the book deals with the issue of valuing risky cash flows in a world with taxes. In particular, it addresses two interesting and new questions: First it deals with the notion of cost of capital, which has to be used to disount future cash flows. The authors notice that in the literature, several definitions of this important concept can be found: cost of capital as an expected return, as a yield, or as a discount rate. Kruschwitz and Loeffler discuss all of them and their particular advantages and disadvantages. In the end, they define cost of capital as a conditional expected return, since this is the only definition that is both suitable for the DCF framework in a multiperiod context and consistent with models used for emirical estimation, such as the CAPM.
The main part of the book is devoted to the question, why there are several different valuation approaches within the DCF framework, e.g. the Adjusted Present Value (APV), or the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC). In order to answer the question, the authors start with the famous result, as shown by Modigliani and Miller, that in a world with taxes, a levered firm is more valuable than an unlevered company because of the tax advantage of debt. The authors derive a rather general equation for the value of those tax advantages, and show that different debt financing policies means tax advantages with different stochastic characteristics. And this leads, quite naturally, to different values of those tax advantages. Insofar, APV (riskles tax advantages) and WACC (stochastic tax advantages) are just special cases, and there will be as many different "DCF methods" as there are conceivable debt financing policies. Kruschwitz and Loeffler develop equations for new and interesting policies, such es fixing future debt ratios not to market values, but rather to book values, or debt financing based on future cash "flow-to-debt" ratios.
What I like most is the concise and rigorous writing style of the authors: They manage to give valuation equations that are applicable to real situations, that can be used "in practice", so to speak. But on the other hand, for an academic, their new results opened a wide field of future research to be done.
All in all, it's an excellent book. In order to apply the DCF framework to particular situations, it is necessary to fully appreciate the effects of diverse financing policies on firm value - and these are provided in this book in a thorough and comprehensive way.