Cor­por­ate Fin­ance

Course content

This course provides a broad overview of corporate finance covering the main tools that financial managers use to analyze investment and financing decisions. The first set of lectures will be devoted to introducing students to the goals pursued by corporations and to the financial side of their operations. Subsequently, we will be reviewing some of the accounting concepts that represent an essential background in this field, and we will introduce the concept of "time value of money", which will be a key building block in developing our theory of asset pricing. The same paradigm will also be applied to the valuation of the streams of cash flows that firms generate through their investment projects, which will ultimately lead us to the formulation of a method for making investment decisions.

In relation to Nordic Nine:

The course introduces students to the finances of firms, both from the funding side and the investment side. It intersects with the Nordic Nine vision in several dimensions:

• Deep business knowledge: It provides students with detailed knowledge on the mechanics of both financing and investment by providing students with a firm understanding of a framework for making solid financial decisions based on empirical analytics.
• Competitive in business and producing prosperity: The methods taught in the course are a cornerstone to building up any financially successful company. As such it provides the skills needed to stay competitive in the modern corporate world, as well as giving the foundations for creating corporate economic prosperity.
• Data analytics: Empirical calculations are an integral part of the course. Only with data analytics can one measure the financial performance of companies and the financial impact of managerial decisions.
• Relearning: The course is structured in such a way that students are introduced to all the techniques necessary to make financially sound decisions. Thereafter all techniques are revisited in the second half of the course within particular subjects and topics of corporate finance. Thereby students relearn the techniques by applying them repeatedly to different real-world scenarios.
• Critical thinking: The course emphasis the importance of not only producing financial data, but also learning to interpret those - as well as explaining how that interpretation can differ depending on the circumstances or scenarios one might find himself/herself in. It is thereby underlined that only with critically evaluating the financial information can students become successful financial managers.