Essentials of Corporate Finance - Lemezzel [antikvár]

Preface We wrote this book because so many of you told us of changes taking place in your introductory finance classes. What we have learned, both from comments and discussions we have had with you and from our own classes, is that this course is increasingly the only finance course a majority of students enrolled will ever take. In addition, a growing percentage of students in introductory finance classes do not have traditional pre-business backgrounds. Finally, time pressure during the term and the desire to integrate other materials increasingly mean that only a limited number of chapters can be covered. So what did we do about it? We have always maintained that the subject of corporate finance can be viewed as the working of a few very powerful intuitions. Based on the gratifying market feedback we have received over the last several years from our first edition, as well as from our other text, Fundamentals of Corporate Finance (now in its 4th edition), many of you agi'ee. We therefore decided to continue to try and distill the subject down to its bare essentials (hence, the name of this book), while retaining a decidedly modem approach to finance. Our goal is to produce a text that conveys the most important concepts and principles at a level that is approachable for the widest possible audience in a package that realistically can be covered in a single term. To accomplish our goal, we assembled a diverse panel of our colleagues currentiy teaching introductory finance courses. We asked them to tell us what should and what should not be included. Based on their feedback, we omitted material on more specialized subjects altogether. We then went through every remaining topic, paring back as recommended and eliminating material not absolutely essential. We very consciously tried to hold computation and mathematical formulations to the minimum needed to convey key financial principles. This process led us to condense several subject treatments, such as capital budgeting, to single chapters. As a result, Essentials provides a thorough survey in only 18 chapters. Another thing we learned from our reviewers (and our own teaching experience) is that a single chapter on time value of money just contains too much number cmnching and too many new concepts for a large percentage of students. We therefore wrote two chapters on time value for Essentials to break the subject into more manageable size and promote a building block approach. The first chapter considers only the basics of compounding and discounting. With these principles firmly in place, the second chapter expands to cover annuities and other financial instmments. Similarly, we provide two chapters on risk and return because the subject is so important and contains so many new and novel ideas, and we also have separate chapters on stocks and bonds with broader coverage of market operations. Beyond this, to motivate various subjects and to illustrate the wide applicability and relevance of topics covered in the text, we created two ranning series of boxes called Practice This!