Rsm Msc in Fin Syllabus

Corporate Finance MSc in Finance and Investments Autumn 2010, Block 1 dr. Arjen Mulder & dr. Lars Norden

Course name Course code Course load Term Teaching staff Course structure Course schedule Examination Blackboard Corporate Finance bkm07fi 5 ects Autumn, block 1 dr. Arjen Mulder (lectures 1-4) dr. Lars Norden (lectures 5-8) Plenary lectures See schedule Written closed book exam plus assignments http://www.eur.edu

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Course description

This course will provide you with a better understanding of corporate finance and value creation. The firm’s capital structure is our main point of departure for every lecture. We discuss the role of agency problems, asymmetric information, and the incentives provided by debt and creditors to management. In the last four lectures, we discuss empirical evidence on the value impact of specific capital structure decisions.

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Course schedule and organisation

Timetable

We do eight plenary lectures, scheduled on Wednesdays (09:00-12:00 hrs.), from 01 September through 13 October 2009. The second class takes place on Thursday 02 September (12:00-15:00 hrs.).

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Reading materials

Required reading: For this course, we only use academic papers. There is no required textbook for this course. In fact, there is no published textbook that puts together the theory of corporate finance in one rigorous, self-contained, and notationally consistent package. Thus, your main references will be the assigned academic papers. Each paper in this course manual comes with a url that is hyperlinked. All papers can thus be downloaded from the Internet, provided that you either work from the Erasmus computer network, or that you have established a so-called vpn connection (see http://www.eur.nl/english/erna/network/erna vpn service/). 1

Background reading: Due to the rather technical nature of some papers, this course is less suitable for autodidact. We hence highly encourage you to actively participate in class. Some people may...