The Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST) operates membership warehouses that offer a wide variety of branded and private label products in no-frills, self-service warehouse facilities. In 2008 the company paid total cash dividends of $265,029,000 and had net income of $1,282,725,000.
Required:
a. What was the firm's dividend payout ratio?
b. If Costco were to earn $1.58 billion in 2009 and maintained the same dividend payout ratio that it paid in 2008, what would the firm's dividends be?

wilson's has 10,000 shares of common stock outstanding at a market price of $35 a share. the firm also has a bond issue outstanding with a total face value of $250,000 which is selling for 102 percent of face value. the cost of equity is 11 percent while the preminustax cost of debt is 8 percent. the firm has a beta of 1.1 and a tax rate of 34 percent. what is wilson's weighted average cost of capital?

Performance bicycle company makes steel and titanium handle bars for bicycles. it requires approximately 1 hour of labor to make one handle bar of either type. during the most recent accounting period, barr company made 7,700 steel bars and 2,300 titanium bars. setup costs amounted to $35,000. one batch of each type of bar was run each month. if a single company-wide overhead rate based on direct labor hours is used to allocate overhead costs to the two products, the amount of setup cost assigned to the steel bars will be:

Which of the following would not generally be a motive for a firm to hold inventories? a. to decouple or separate parts of the production process b. to provide a stock of goods that will provide a selection for customers c. to take advantage of quantity discounts d. to minimize holding costs e. all of the above are functions of inventory.