This course is aimed at introducing the principles of corporate finance and its applications. These principles are essential to understanding the nature of how corporations present their financial condition, finance themselves and manage their financial risks. Four building blocks studied in the course are (1) review of financial statement analysis; (2) valuation of future cash flows; (3) capital budgeting; (4) risk and return. While making optimal corporate financial decisions is the main focus of the course, along the way students will learn skills that will guide you in your personal financial decisions as well. The tools learned in this course allow students to assess whether an investment is worthwhile, how it might be improved, and how it might be funded.
Learning Goals:
- Develop a conceptual framework for examining a firm’s investment and financial decisions.
- Become familiar with the basics of investing and personal finance management.
- Become familiar with the analytical techniques used in finance.
- Calculate the present and future values of a lump sum or a series of cash flows.
- Differentiate the characteristics of stocks and bonds and estimate their prices.
- Become acquainted with the basics of portfolio management.
This course is a continuation of EC211 but we move onto more specific topics of firm/project valuation, financing, and LBO modeling which constitute three building blocks studied in the course. Each block contains two components: theoretical and practical. The former introduces students to financial ``language" and models, whereas the latter equips students with the tools that are currently expected of analysts in entry level positions in financial services industry and academic research. Depending on the pace of the progress of the class, please expect to use Excel and the elements of basic programming using Python for data fetching and visualization.
Learning Goals:
- Understand and solve typical capital budgeting and project analysis questions that firms face.
- Understand (i) how a firm should choose the set of securities it issues to raise capital and (ii) whether capital structure affects firm value.
- Become familiar with the basics of pricing for financial and real options.
- Learn techniques firms use to manage risk and minimize its impact on firm value.
- Understand how leveraged buyouts (LBOs) work in practice and the sources of LBO value creation.
We examine how technological advances have reconfigured the current state of financial industry and how they are set to shape the future of finance and business. The course examines the primary FinTech data science methods and tools and their applications to real FinTech questions, such as algorithmic trading. Students will learn how to extract and harness data with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning using open APIs and Python. We explore how blockchain and cryptocurrency have transformed personal finance, banking, and payments industries. Attention will be given to the limits, risks, and broader policy and social implications of FinTech.
Learning Goals:
- Learn the core fundamentals of financial engineering, from exploratory data analysis to predicting stock returns and backtesting/forward-testing trading strategies.
- Learn the fundamentals of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) infrastructure, including the basics of digital assets and blockchain, and understand the role of crypto as an asset class.
- Learn the fundamentals of investing and banking in the DeFi era: understand the building blocks of robo-advising, the consumer credit landscape, the promise and conceptual challenges of crowdfunding, and the evolution of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending.
- Become confident in communicating your analysis and views on diverse FinTech topics to a variety of audiences across a range of formats.
Check out selected final projects by my students:
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IT Spend: Is It Worth It? (Revisiting the Solow Paradox in Modern Financial Firms by Jasper Paez ’26)
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Goose Chase (Interactive Exploration of Intraday Predictability and Trading Incentives by Dean Palermo ’26)