The Financial Analysis and Accouting Research Centre was created in 2006 around the them of company valuation. Cultural and technological changes now make it possible to use multiple dynamic analyses, the cornerstone of which is the discount rate. There is an abundance of academic research into the determination of the discount rate, but the gap between academe and business seems to be growing wider by the day. In practice, those who do the valuations often oversimplify, invalidating their reasoning; they may even ignore theory and transform the discount rate into a black box to hide the absence of objective and academic foundations in the determination of the risk premium and of beta.

The objective of the EDHEC Financial Analysis and Accounting Research Centre is to call into question certain financial paradigms, in particular that which consists of separating idiosyncratic riskbecause it is diversifiablefrom the risk premium and to provide the financial markets (financial analysts, investors, companies, rating agencies, auditors) with new light on the discount rate and to recommend new ways to determine it.

The great diversity of backgrounds is one of the advantages of the research centre (specialists in financial analysis, in accounting, in law, researchers from academe or from business), and it allows the centre to take a multi-disciplinary approach to financial analysis: company valuation, impact of IFRS and Solvency II on insurance companies, the impact of IFRS on the valuation and pricing of risk, growing use of fairness opinions, the status of the outside expert, and the measurement of intangible assets.

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