Which of the following statements is correct? a. the component cost of preferred stock is expressed as rp(1 - t). this follows because preferred stock dividends are treated as fixed charges, and as such they can be deducted by the issuer for tax purposes. b. no cost should be assigned to retained earnings because the firm does not have to pay anything to raise them. they are generated as cash flows by operating assets that were raised in the past, hence they are "free." c. if a firm has enough retained earnings to fund its capital budget for the coming year, then there is no need to estimate either a cost of equity or a wacc. d. a cost should be assigned to retained earnings due to the opportunity cost principle, which refers to the fact that the firm's stockholders would themselves expect to earn a return on earnings that were paid out rather than retained and reinvested. e. suppose a firm has been losing money and thus is not paying taxes, and this situation is expected to persist into the foreseeable future. in this case, the firm's before-tax and after-tax costs of debt for purposes of calculating the wacc will both be equal to the interest rate on the firm's currently outstanding debt, provided that debt was issued during the past 5 years.

Onsider the following subscription behavior information from genie, a web site that provides tools for constructing a family tree (ancestor search). subscriptions cost $9.99 per month, but you are charged for the entire year at the time of purchase. there is a one-year minimum term when you sign up for the service. once purchased, subscriptions are set to renew automatically unless the subscriber cancels them. when a membership renews, it renews for a one-year term and again you are charged for the entire year. there are no variable costs associated with providing this service to an individual customer, but genie does engage in customer relationship activities that they believe will increase customer retention. these customer relationship activities cost genie about $10 per year per customer. based on a sample of 1000 customers that joined genie five years ago, near the time when the company was founded, they were able to determine how many of those customers remained subscribers in the second year, third year etc. based on this information, genie calculated the average annual retention rate to be 20%. genie uses an annual discount rate of 8%. a. last year, genie spent $10,000 placing advertisements on google. genie management believes that these advertisements were responsible for about 300 new subscribers. would you recommend to genie management that they purchase more google ads? b. suppose a newly-introduced loyalty program increases the number of customers that remained to 30%. does this new data change your answer to 9.a? c. do you have any hesitations or concerns about making recommendations to management based on your above estimate of customer lifetime value?

Portia grant is an employee who is paid monthly. for the month of january of the current year, she earned a total of $8,388. the fica tax for social security is 6.2% of the first $118,500 earned each calendar year and the fica tax rate for medicare is 1.45% of all earnings. the futa tax rate of 0.6% and the suta tax rate of 5.4% are applied to the first $7,000 of an employee's pay. the amount of federal income tax withheld from her earnings was $1,391.77. what is the total amount of taxes withheld from the portia's earnings?

Caleb construction (cc) incurs supervisor salaries expense in the construction of homes. if cc manufactures 100 homes in a year, fixed supervisor salaries will be $400,000. with the current construction supervisors, cc's productive capacity is 150 homes in a year. however, if cc is contracts to build more than 150 homes per year, it will need to hire additional supervisors, which are hired as full-time rather than temporary employees. cc's productive capacity would then become 200 homes per year, and salaries expense would increase to $470,000. how would cc’s salaries expense be properly classified? fixed variable mixed stepped curvilinear