In the September 2002 issue of the Business Valuation Review published by the American Society of Appraisers, Dr. Stanley Jay Feldman, Chairman of Axiom Valuation Solutions, and Associate Professor of Finance, Bentley College, has authored a paper reviewing regression analysis results used in evaluating the size of the marketability discount for privately held firms. The paper that this article was based upon is available here.

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Summary

Academic research suggests that the size of the marketability discount is in the neighborhood of 13.5% and more recent work has suggested it may be as low as 7.23%. The regression models of Silber, and Hertzel and Smith have provided both the intellectual and empirical basis for these conclusions. These models were initially developed to study the determinants of the marketability discount. It has been suggested that they should now be used as a basis for forecasting the marketability discount. This paper demonstrates that these models should not be used for this purpose because the forecast errors are likely to be large. Moreover, based on the structure of these models and their prediction errors, it is not possible to state with any certainty that a 13.5% marketability discount is statistically different than a discount of say 25%.