Capital Budgeting and Corporate Performance Available to Purchase

Capital budgeting is, perhaps, best defined as the art of finding assets that are worth more than they cost. Nothing is easier in concept or harder in practical application. An apparently endless supply of textbooks, journal articles and research papers discuss and develop the concepts with the tacit assumption that their adoption will improve performance. When we consider the practical application of capital budgeting, however, we see firms making investment decisions faced with unprecedentedly high levels of inflation, financing costs, and other major economic difficulties. Capital budgeting has never been more difficult. It would not then appear unreasonable that those firms which applied advanced techniques and had sophisticated capital budgeting systems should have survived the buffeting of the seventies better than firms using little or no formalised investment system. The research being conducted is intended to determine whether in fact this is the case.