The annual effective discount rate expresses the amount of interest paid or earned as a percentage of the balance at the end of the annual period.
It is related to but slightly smaller than the effective rate of interest, which expresses the amount of interest as a percentage of the balance at the start of the period.
The discount rate is commonly used for U.S. Treasury bills and similar financial instruments.
For example, consider a government bond that sells for $95 ('balance' in the bond at the start of period) and pays $100 ('balance' in the bond at the end of period) in a year's time.
For every effective interest rate
times over equal subintervals of a year is found from the annual effective rate d as where
is called the annual nominal rate of discount convertible
is always bigger than d because the rate of discount convertible
thly is applied in each subinterval to a smaller (already discounted) sum of money.
As such, in order to achieve the same total amount of discounting the rate has to be slightly more than 1/pth of the annual rate of discount.
Businesses consider this discount rate when deciding whether to invest profits to buy equipment or whether to deliver the profit to shareholders.
In an ideal world, they would buy a piece of equipment if shareholders would get a bigger profit later.
The amount of extra profit a shareholder requires to prefer that the company buy the equipment rather than giving them the profit now is based on the shareholder's discount rate.
A common way of estimating shareholders' discount rates uses share price data is known as the capital asset pricing model.
Businesses normally apply this discount rate by calculating the net present value of the decision.