Charles "Chuck" Gordon Callard (2 June 1923–1 May 2004) was born in Lansing, Michigan

Lansing, Michigan

Lansing is the capital of the U.S. state of Michigan. It is located mostly in Ingham County, although small portions of the city extend into Eaton County. The 2010 Census places the city's population at 114,297, making it the fifth largest city in Michigan...

. He was a pilot on an aircraft carrier

Aircraft carrier

An aircraft carrier is a warship designed with a primary mission of deploying and recovering aircraft, acting as a seagoing airbase. Aircraft carriers thus allow a naval force to project air power worldwide without having to depend on local bases for staging aircraft operations...

 while serving in the United States Navy

United States Navy

The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...

 during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 and then earned his MBA at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 1947. Callard taught statistics at Miami University

Miami University

Miami University is a coeducational public research university located in Oxford, Ohio, United States. Founded in 1809, it is the 10th oldest public university in the United States and the second oldest university in Ohio, founded four years after Ohio University. In its 2012 edition, U.S...

 in Oxford, Ohio

Oxford, Ohio

Oxford is a city in northwestern Butler County, Ohio, United States, in the southwestern portion of the state. It lies in Oxford Township, originally called the College Township. The population was 21,943 at the 2000 census. This college town was founded as a home for Miami University. Oxford...

 for several years.

In 1969 he started Callard, Madden & Associates. The insights that he developed became a bridge between academic finance and the worlds of corporate finance and asset management. Callard was the first in the inflationary 1970s to adjust standard accounting data so that they would conform with the financial concepts then being developed at the Graduate School of Business. He recognized the flaws in the traditional accounting measures and developed alternative economic measures of corporate performance. He used this approach to demonstrate that the effective corporate tax rates were much higher than the legislated rates and differed greatly among firms that otherwise appeared to be subject to the same tax rates.

One of Callard’s greatest contributions was to develop a systematic explanation of the cost of capital

Cost of capital

The cost of capital is a term used in the field of financial investment to refer to the cost of a company's funds , or, from an investor's point of view "the shareholder's required return on a portfolio of all the company's existing securities"...

 for individual firms. The cost of capital for all firms varied in response to changes in the national inflation rate and to changes in corporate tax rates. The cost of capital for individual firms was affected by the levels and the rates of growth of their anticipated profits and by the variability of their cash flows. Similarly a cost of capital could be assigned to each of the business units within a firm.

Callard’s insights extended to capital structure

Capital structure

In finance, capital structure refers to the way a corporation finances its assets through some combination of equity, debt, or hybrid securities. A firm's capital structure is then the composition or 'structure' of its liabilities. For example, a firm that sells $20 billion in equity and $80...

; he distinguished between the costs of debt capital and the costs of equity capital, which varied extensively relative to each other over the phases of the business and economic cycle. While each firm was a price-taker in the capital market, each could affect its aggregate cost of capital by altering the shares of debt and of equity in its capital structure. Some firms were too extensively leveraged and could reduce their costs of capital by reducing the debt component of their capital structure while other firms could reduce their costs of capital by increasing the debt component.

Chuck Callard died in 2004.