Research is a strategic investment for EDHEC, not just to maintain its academic reputation but also, and above all, because it is at the heart of the growth in the offerings of the school. What makes its strategy of European excellence unique is that it strives to put its research at the service of business. These efforts may seem banal, but they are in fact a break from the purely academic vision of research (in which competition for top spots in the rankings often determines publication strategies and research subjects); the aim is to favour the creation of a dynamic in which business and society are at the heart of research. This innovative approach to research, which aims to make it useful to business, makes it unique and is the reason for its success.

The Financial Analysis and Accounting Research Centre was created in 2006 around the theme 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.

The EDHEC Financial Analysis and Accounting Research Centre is working on five research programmes:

1. Determination of the cost of capital

2. Impact of IFRS on company valuation

3. Corporate governance, valuation, and cost of capital

4. Impact of regulations for outside appraisals on company valuation

5. Impact of non-financial information on company valuation

The mission of the EDHEC Research Centre in Financial Analysis and Accounting is also to accompany professionals in their use of the Centre's research results and thus to offer consulting and financial engineering services.