Lecture Notes In Introduction To Corporate Finance

This volume will introduce the reader to basic topics of corporate finance. The notes will provide an integrative model that will help students evaluate projects, examine financing alternatives and assess a firm. With problems and detailed solutions at the end of each chapter, this volume will also greatly benefit financial managers and investors. Corporate finance is a discipline from the firm's perspective and addresses the concerns of the Chief Financial Officer of the firm. Additionally, investors need to understand why firms make certain decisions so that they better recognize what drives firm value. These lecture notes assume no previous knowledge of finance, and are written in conversational style that makes the topics more accessible and easy to comprehend and absorb.

This course of lectures introduces students to elementary concepts of corporate finance using a more systematic approach than is generally found in other textbooks. Axioms are first highlighted and the implications of these important concepts are studied afterwards. These implications are used to answer questions about corporate finance, including issues related to derivatives pricing, state-price probabilities, dynamic hedging, dividends, capital structure decisions, and risk and incentive management. Numerical examples are provided, and the mathematics is kept simple throughout. In this second edition, explanations have been improved, based on the authors' experience teaching the material, especially concerning the scope of state-price probabilities in Chapter 12. There is also a new Chapter 22: Fourteen Insights.

"The second edition of Modern Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice combines a forward-looking vision of corporate finance with the tried and true practices of the past. This text emphasizes the modernist movement in finance, which is based on systematic methodology with an emphasis on deductive reasoning and empirical validation. The modernist movement produces a market-value-based approach to finance that emphasizes shareholder wealth maximization, options, and agency relationships. This movement has expanded without question, the frontiers of knowledge in finance. Until Modern Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice, instructors have lacked a framework from which to teach these concepts at the introductory level."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This Advanced Introduction presents the modern theories of corporate finance. Its focus on core concepts offers useful managerial insights, bolstered by recent empirical evidence, to provide a richer understanding of critical corporate financial policy decisions.

Corporate finance is the area of finance that studies the determinants of firms' values, including capital structure, financing, and investment decisions. Although there are several excellent texts in corporate finance, this is the first to focus on the theoretical foundations of the subject in a consistent and integrated way at the Ph.D. level. In addition to a textbook for advanced graduate students, it can also serve as a general reference to researchers and sophisticated practitioners. The material presented is carefully selected with an eye to what is essential to understanding the underlying theory, ensuring that this text will remain useful for years to come. The book is divided into three parts. The first section presents the basic principles of valuation based on the absence of arbitrage, including a discussion of the determinants of the optimal capital structure based on the seminal results of Modigliani and Miller. The second section discusses the implications of agency problems and information asymmetries to capital structure, giving particular attention to payout policy and to debt contract design. The concluding portion presents different ways of restructuring capital, including going public, going private using stock repurchases or leveraged buyouts, and mergers and acquisitions. Each chapter includes exercises that vary in difficulty, with suggested solutions provided in an appendix. This book will assuredly be the standard doctoral- and professional-level explication of corporate finance theory and its appropriate applications.

This volume presents lecture notes for a course in behavioral finance, most suitable for MBA students, but also adaptable for a PhD class. These lecture notes are based on the author's experience in teaching behavioral finance classes at Bocconi University (at the PhD level) and at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo (MBA). Written in a way that is user-friendly for both teachers and students, this book is the first of its kind and consolidates all the material necessary for a course on behavioral finance, balancing psychological concepts with financial applications. Material formerly presented only in academic papers has been transformed to a format more suitable for students, while the most important issues have been highlighted in boxes that can form the basis of a lecturer's teaching slides. In addition to corralling all the currently scattered materials into one book, a neat logical order is introduced to the subject matter. Behavioral finance is put in a context relative to the other disciplines of finance, its history is outlined and the way it evolved -- from an eclectic collection of counter examples to market efficiency into a bona fide discipline of finance -- is reviewed and explained. The 17 topic-based chapters in this book are each intended for a 90-minute lecture. The first five chapters (Part 1) provide the psychological and financial foundations of behavioral finance. The next 12 chapters (Part 2) are applications: Chapters 6-13 cover the essentials while Chapters 14-17 are special, elective topics.

The book addresses several problems in contemporary corporate finance: optimal capital structure, both in the US and in the G7 economies; the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and the Arbitrage Pricing Model (APT) and the implications for the cost of capital; dividend policy; sales forecasting and pro forma statement analysis; leverage and bankruptcy; and mergers and acquisitions. It is designed to be used as an advanced graduate corporate financial management textbook.

This is an introduction to an investment course that focuses on basic models used in the financial industry for investment and decision making. The course begins with an overview of the investment environment in developed markets, followed by a more in-depth analysis of key investment topics. These topics include modern portfolio theory, asset pricing models, term structure of interest rates, stock and bond portfolio management and evaluation of portfolio performance. Modern finance extensively uses the concept of arbitrage, or rather the lack of it in financial markets, and the course highlights such uses in different circumstances.The course takes a hands-on approach with the aid of a software package, Maple™, the details of which will be explained during the first lecture. Consequently, most lectures will be divided between a theoretical lecture and a lab — a practical implementation of the theoretical material of the lecture. The use of the Maple™ software in this course simulates, to a certain extent, a professional environment. It allows visualizations of different concepts, minimizes tedious algebraic calculations and the use of calculus while equipping students with intuitive understanding. This is facilitated by the symbolic power of Maple™ and its excellent graphic and animation capabilities.Institutional material is surveyed very concisely, so the reader gets an appreciation of the investment 'lay of the land'. It is enhanced by an eLearning unit, self-administrated quizzes as well as a stock market game, utilizing StockTrack™. StockTrack™ introduces students to trading in the real world by practicing different types of orders as well as introducing conventions common in the investment community.