Cases in Financial Management

Catalog description

The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with the core concepts and theory underlying much of the general understanding of corporate finance and its impact on corporate valuation. The first part of the course consists of lectures on corporate finance theory which explore the links between a firm's financing decisions, its investment decisions, and corporate structure through the lenses of taxes, information asymmetries, and the conflicts of interest between its various stakeholders. The second part of the course consists of case studies which illustrate the relevance of the theoretical framework for (understanding and designing) real-world corporate financial strategy and for (understanding and dealing with) strategic issues in corporate valuation. The course material is organized around central corporate finance "concepts" (debt overhang, risk-shifting, managerial agency, adverse selection, etc.) and "applications" (bankruptcy and restructuring, IPOs and valuation, M&A, corporate governance, etc.).