January 2018 Data Update 5: Country Risk Update

In my last post, I looked at the currency confusions that globalization has brought into financial analysis, and how to clean up for them. In this post, I discuss the other aspect of globalization that is forcing analysts to change long accepted practices in estimating equity risk premiums for companies. Taking what they have learned from finance textbooks blindly, practitioners have taken what they learned about equity risk premiums to emerging and frontier equity markets, often with disastrous results. Not only have they practiced denial when it comes to the additional risk that investors face in many markets, from political, economic and legal sources, but they have also considered risk by looking at where a company is incorporated, instead of where it does business. In this post, I will update my country risk measures for the start of 2018, and build on them to measure the equity risk premiums for companies.

Datasets

1. Country Ratings, PRS scores and Equity Risk Premiums (January 2018)
2. Equity Risk Premiums, by Country – Detailed (January 2018)
3. Company Risk Premium Calculator (Spreadsheet)