Corporate Finance Essentials [antikvár]

From the AuthorsWhen we first wrote Corporate Finance Essentials, we thought there might be a small niche for a briefer boolc that really focused on what students with widely varying backgrounds and interests needed to carry away from an introductory finance course. We were wrong. There was a huge niche! What we learned is that our text closely matches the needs of instructors and faculty at hundreds of schools across the country. As a result, the growth we have experienced through the first six editions of Essentials has far exceeded anything we thought possible.With the seventh edition of Corporate Finance Essentials, we have continued to refine our focus on our target audience, which is the undergraduate student taking a core course in business or corporate finance. This can be a tough course to teach. One reason is that the class is usually required of all business students, so it is not uncommon for a majority of the students to be nonfinance majors. In fact, this may be the only finance course many of them will ever have. With this in mind, our goal in Essentials is to convey the most important concepts and principles at a level that is approachable for the widest possible audience.To achieve our goal, we have worked to distill the subject down to its bare essentials (hence, the name of this book), while retaining a decidedly modern approach to finance. We have always maintained that the subject of corporate finance can be viewed as the working of a few very powerful intuitions. We also think that understanding the "why" is just as important, if not more so, than understanding the "how," especially in an introductory course. Based on the gratifying market feedback we have received from our previous editions, as well as from our other text. Fundamentals of Corporate Finance (now in its ninth edition), many of you agree.By design, this book is not encyclopedic. As the table of contents indicates, we have a total of 18 chapters. Chapter length is about 30 pages, so the text is aimed squarely at a single-term course, and most of the book can be realistically covered in a typical semester or quarter. Writing a book for a one-term course necessarily means some picking and choosing, with regard to both topics and depth of coverage. Throughout, we strike a balance by introducing and covering the essentials (there's that word again!) while leaving some more specialized topics to follow-up courses.The other things we have always stressed, and have continued to improve with this edition, are readability and pedagogy. Essentials is written in a relaxed, conversational style that invites the students to join in the learning process rather than being a passive information absorber. We have found that this approach dramatically increases students' willingness to read and learn on their own. Between larger and larger class sizes and the ever-growing demands on faculty time, we think this is an essential (!) feature for a text in an introductory course.Throughout the development of this book, we have continued to take a hard look at what is truly relevant and useful. In doing so, we have worked to downplay purely theoretical issues and minimize the use of extensive and elaborate calculations to illustrate points that are either intuitively obvious or of limited practical use.As a result of this process, three basic themes emerge as our central focus in writing Corporate Finance Essentials:An Emphasis on Intuition We always try to separate and explain the principles at work on a commonsense, intuitive level before launching into any specifics. The underlyingOrganization of the TextWe designed Corporate Finance Essentials to be as flexible and modular as possible. There are a total of nine parts, and, in broad terms, the instructor is free to decide the particular sequence. Further, within each part, the first chapter generally contains an overview and survey. Thus, when time is limited, subsequent chapters can be omitted. Finally, the sections placed early in each chapter are generally the most important, and later sections frequently can be omitted without loss of continuity. For these reasons, the instructor has great control over the topics covered, the sequence in which they are covered, and the depth of coverage.Just to get an idea of the breadth of coverage in the seventh edition of Essentials, the following grid presents for each chapter some of the most significant new features, as well as a few selected chapter highlights. Of course, in every chapter, figures, opening vignettes, boxed features, and in-chapter illustrations and examples using real companies have been thoroughly updated as well. In addition, the end-of-chapter material has been completely revised.