FIN 5410 - Corporate Finance and Valuation

Credits: 4

This course introduces the basics of a corporate finance and financial valuation course. The goal is to provide a comfortable level of understanding of financial markets and securities for all majors. The course will develop the financial skills and knowledge that will help them interact with the other functions of the firm to make good financial management. This course focuses on what is corporate finance and how financial assets and firms are valued in financial markets. The goal of this course is to help the student’s ability to use financial statement information and related disclosures to evaluate the underlying economics of a corporation. Course participants examine the company’s past and current performance, and its competitive environment by collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from the firm’s financial database. Students develop a financial model of the firm, in the form of pro forma financial statements, in order to forecast the firms’ future performance. These projections in turn become the inputs to the valuation techniques, which include discounted cash flow models, residual income (or abnormal earnings) models, and market multiple (or relative valuation) methods. The course emphasizes the discounted cash flow method of valuation and we use this approach to estimate the intrinsic value of the firm.