Summary
In finance and investing, the dividend discount model (DDM) is a method of valuing the price of a company's stock based on the fact that its stock is worth the sum of all of its future dividend payments, discounted back to their present value. In other words, DDM is used to value stocks based on the net present value of the future dividends. The constant-growth form of the DDM is sometimes referred to as the Gordon growth model (GGM), after Myron J. Gordon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Rochester, and the University of Toronto, who published it along with Eli Shapiro in 1956 and made reference to it in 1959. Their work borrowed heavily from the theoretical and mathematical ideas found in John Burr Williams 1938 book "The Theory of Investment Value," which put forth the dividend discount model 18 years before Gordon and Shapiro. When dividends are assumed to grow at a constant rate, the variables are: is the current stock price. is the constant growth rate in perpetuity expected for the dividends. is the constant cost of equity capital for that company. is the value of dividends at the end of the first period. The model uses the fact that the current value of the dividend payment at (discrete) time is , and so the current value of all the future dividend payments, which is the current price , is the sum of the infinite series This summation can be rewritten as where The series in parenthesis is the geometric series with common ratio so it sums to if . Thus, Substituting the value for leads to which is simplified by multiplying by , so that The DDM equation can also be understood to state simply that a stock's total return equals the sum of its income and capital gains. is rearranged to give So the dividend yield plus the growth equals cost of equity . Consider the dividend growth rate in the DDM model as a proxy for the growth of earnings and by extension the stock price and capital gains. Consider the DDM's cost of equity capital as a proxy for the investor's required total return.
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.