Free Valuation Data: Industry Betas, ERP, Risk Premiums – No Subscription Required

The business valuation data industry has built a lucrative empire on selling practitioners information they could find easily – for free. It’s time to talk about it.

There is a peculiar ritual in the world of business valuation. An appraiser opens their browser, navigates to a subscription portal, enters credentials for a service that runs hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year, and downloads a table of industry betas, or risk premium estimates.

They feel professional. They feel like they have access to something authoritative. And they’ve been sold ice in the Arctic.

The data is publicly available. The education is freely given. What these subscription services are really selling is the comfortable illusion of exclusivity.

The Great Paywall Myth of Valuation Data

Let us be direct about what is happening here. Much of the core quantitative data underlying business appraisal work such as equity risk premium (ERP), industry betas, country risk premiums, default spreads, that help determine the cost of capital in valuation – is methodically compiled, updated, and freely published every year by some of the most respected academics in finance. It is not hidden or obscure. In fact, it is sitting in plain sight, updated more frequently and explained more thoroughly than anything you’ll find behind a pay wall.

Yet a cottage industry of data “publishers” and subscription services has persisted for decades, charging professional business appraisers handsomely to receive this same information – repackaged, reformatted, and surrounded by trappings of proprietary “authority”.

This is not a minor inefficiency. For practitioners and small valuation firms, these subscriptions can represent a meaningful line item in the budget. For the profession as a whole, it represents a collective misdirection of resources – and, worse, a misdirection of intellectual engagement.

The Anatomy of the Model

The playbook is elegant in its simplicity.

• Take data that the academic community has made freely available as a public good.
• Compile it.
• Give it a logo, a clean interface, and a citation format that looks authoritative in an appraisal report.
• Market it to time-pressed practitioners who have learned through the culture of their profession that paid sources are somehow more defensive than free ones.
• Charge recurring subscription fees. Repeat annually.

“The data is publicly available – equity risk premiums, industry betas, country risk premiums, updated annually by academics.”

The “defensibility” argument deserves particular scrutiny. The implicit suggestion is that citing a paid commercial source in an appraisal report carries more weight than citing the underlying academic work.

This is exactly backwards. The academic sources are the authority; the subscription service is the citation layer.

The Real Question to Ask

Before renewing any valuation data subscription, ask yourself: Where does this data actually come from? Could I access the primary source directly?

In the vast majority of cases, the answer to the second question is yes. You can get the original data – for free.

What Free Actually Looks Like

Professor Aswath Damodaran of NYU’s Stern School of Business is the most prominent example of academic generosity in this space, but he is not alone.

Each year, he publishes exhaustive datasets on his website covering implied equity risk premiums (ERP) derived from a live DCF model based on S&P 500 index performance, betas by industry sector broken out by leverage and financial metrics, and much more.

“These are not rough estimates. These are the same data points – built on the same underlying methodologies – that commercial services are reselling.”

More importantly, Damodaran publishes the worksheets themselves. You can see exactly how the implied ERP is derived from the Discounted Cash Flow model. You can trace every assumption. On top of that, you can stress-test inputs. And you can teach yourself the underlying logic of the estimate rather than simply receiving a number to insert into a report.

That last point is not accidental – it is the entire ballgame. The difference between a practitioner who understands where a risk premium comes from and one who simply looks it up in a subscription database is the difference between a skilled business appraiser and a data-entry function waiting to be automated.

“A skilled appraiser understands where the risk premium comes from. The rest is just retrieval.”

The Appraisal Profession Deserves Better

This is not an argument against all professional resources. There are legitimate data products in the valuation space – curated transaction databases containing private company comparable data and industry-specific research – that aggregate information that genuinely is difficult to compile independently. That is a defensible value proposition.

Professional associations, mentors, and educators in the valuation field have an obligation to close this information gap. When a new business appraiser enters the profession and their first lesson is “here are the subscriptions you need”, without any introduction to the underlying academic literature, the profession has done them a disservice.

Start Here, Not There

If you are a practitioner who has been relying exclusively on subscription services for your data inputs, the exercise below costs nothing and takes an afternoon.

• Visit the primary academic sources
• Download the datasets
• Open the worksheets
• Try to understand the methodology behind the numbers you use every day

You may find that you already have everything you need. You may also find something rarer and more valuable than any subscription service can offer: a genuine understanding of what you are doing and why.

That is knowledge worth having. It should not cost a subscription fee.

Free Valuation Data Resources Every Appraiser Should Know

1. Implied ERP and DCF Model. The equity risk premium derived from the S&P 500 index performance, updated monthly.
2. Betas by Industry Sector (US). Levered, unlevered, and cash-adjusted betas across industry sectors.
3. Betas by Industry Sector (Global). Same dataset, global company universe.
4. Country Risk Premiums. Default spreads and total premiums for 150+ countries worldwide.
5. All Current Data (Master Hub). Every dataset – valuation multiples, margins, returns, leverage – in one place.
6. Historical and Archived Datasets. Full time series going back decades for all major metrics.
7. ERP Paper – 2025 Edition (free PDF). The definitive annual paper on equity risk premium methodology and estimation.
8. FRED – Federal Reserve Economic Data. Risk-free rates, Treasury yields, inflation, economic indicators.