Corporate finance

The course aims at providing knowledge of the financial aspects of an enterprise or corporation in order to enable students to assess its prospects, estimate its value, understand the process for deciding the investments underpinning its growth, judge the best way to source funds for such investments, understand hedging and payout decisions, all in the context of the financial and institutional environment in which firms operate.

At the end of the course the student knows a corporation's accounts explaining how the main internal governance and external environment issues are interrelated and how they can best be analyzed to gauge the health, prospects and value of a business. Specifically, the student knows the time value of money, the cost of capital and the identification of the appropriate discount or hurdle rate, the main decision criteria such as IRR, NPV, repayment period, capital structure and distribution policies and the main issues involved in the decision to hedge risk through futures and options.