By: Aswath Damodaran
For much of the last decade, I have been incorporating the idea that companies age, just like human beings do, and with just as much reluctance, into my corporate finance, valuation and investment philosophies classes. In short, it has become my one unifying construct that I can use to explain or at least talk about almost every phenomenon in business. Drawing on those lessons, and my many blog posts on the corporate life cycle, I have written a book on the topic, The Corporate Life Cycle. The book starts with a description of the life cycle, and the determinants of its length and shape, and then has four separate sections (each with 3-5 chapters) on implications for corporate finance, valuation, investing and management.
