A large fraction of America's equipment is leased rather than purchased. This chapter both described the institutional arrangements surrounding leases and showed how to evaluate leases financially.
Leases can be separated into two polar types. Though operating leases allow the lessee to use the equipment, ownership remains with the lessor. Although the lessor in a financial lease legally owns the equipment, the lessee maintains effective ownership because financial leases are fully amortized.
When a firm purchases an asset with debt, both the asset and the liability appear on the firm's balance sheet. If a lease meets at least one of a number of criteria, it must be capitalized. This means that the present value of the lease appears as both an asset and a liability. A lease escapes capitalization if it does not meet any of these criteria. Leases not meeting the criteria are called operating leases, though the accountant's definition differs somewhat from the practitioner's definition. Operating leases do not appear on the balance sheet. For cosmetic reasons, many firms prefer that a lease be called operating.
Firms generally lease for tax purposes. To protect its interests, the IRS allows financial arrangements to be classified as leases only if a number of criteria are met.
We showed that risk-free cash flows should be discounted at the aftertax risk-free rate. Because both lease payments and depreciation tax shields are nearly riskless, all relevant cash flows in the lease–buy decision should be discounted at a rate near this aftertax rate. We use the real-world convention of discounting at the aftertax interest rate on the lessee's secured debt.
Though this method is simple, it lacks certain intuitive appeal. We presented an alternative method in the hopes of increasing the reader's intuition. Relative to a lease, a purchase generates debt capacity. This increase in debt capacity can be calculated by discounting the difference between the cash flows of the purchase and the cash flows of the lease by the aftertax interest rate. The increase in debt capacity from a purchase is compared to the extra outflow at year 0 from a purchase.
If the lessor is in the same tax bracket as the lessee, the cash flows to the lessor are exactly the opposite of the cash flows to the lessee. Thus, the sum of the value of the lease to the lessee plus the value of the lease to the lessor must be zero. Although this suggests that leases can never fly, there are actually at least three good reasons for leasing:
Differences in tax brackets between lessor and lessee.
Shift of risk bearing to the lessor.
Minimization of transaction costs.
We also documented a number of bad reasons for leasing.
