For the purposes of this research, divisional cost of capital is taken to be part of a larger concern: determining the cost of equity capital for any firm or division of a firm without publicly traded equity. For example, estimation of the rate of return for a private firm for the valuation purposes is a related problem of interest. Similarly, a company may wish to price the equity risk of a single profit center, plant, or product using accounting data. Consider the statement of Bruce Dannenburg, then of Digital Equipment Corporation, in theFinancial Managementpanel session cited above: ‘‘You can clearly see that there is a drastic need in the real world for divisional hurdle rates. In fact...there is a need not only for divisional hurdle rates but for project specific hurdle rates as well’’ (p. 23). The techniques examined herein are potentially applicable to all of these situations, although as a practical matter there are often non-systematic factors which must be considered when valuing private equity interests.