Aswath Damodaran

Aswath Damodaran (born 24 September 1957) is an Indian-American academic who currently serves as Kerschner Family Chair in Finance Education and is also Professor of Finance at Stern School of Business of New York University.

He is widely known as the author of several widely used academic and practitioner texts on valuation, corporate finance and investment management.

Contributions to Valuation Damodaran is a prominent advocate of Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis. He emphasizes that the value of an asset is the present value of its expected future cash flows, adjusted for the risk that those cash flows will not be realized.

The basic DCF formula used in his teaching is:

where: is the free cash flow in period ; is the cost of capital or discount rate reflecting the risk profile; is the life of the asset.

Early life and education He was born in Chennai, India. Damodaran received a Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting from Loyola College, Chennai (1977) and a post graduate diploma in management (equivalent to an MBA) from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (1979). He later earned both an MBA (1981) and a PhD (1985) from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Career Damodaran has been a professor at NYU Stern School of Business since 1986. He also teaches in the TRIUM Global Executive MBA Program and provides comprehensive data for valuation purposes to the public. From 1984 to 1986, he was a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

Works Selected Books Damodaran on Valuation: Security Analysis for Investment and Corporate Finance (1994) Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice (1996) Investment Philosophies: Successful Strategies and the Investors Who Made Them Work (2003) Investment Fables: Exposing the Myths of "Can't Miss" Investment Strategies (2004) Strategic Risk Taking: A Framework For Risk Management (2007) The Dark Side of Valuation: Valuing Old Tech, New Tech, and New Economy Companies (2nd Edition 2009) The Little Book of Valuation: How to Value a Company, Pick a Stock and Profit (Wiley, 2011) Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset (3rd Edition 2012) Applied Corporate Finance: A User's Manual (4th Edition 2014) Narrative and Numbers: The Value of Stories in Business (2017) The Corporate Life Cycle: Managing, Valuation and Investing Implications (2024)