These web pages are for Professor Petersen's Accelerated Corporate Finance course (Finance 440). They are a useful source of course resources. Major changes and additions will be announced on the course discussion group on Canvas . You should check the discussion group on a regular basis. Questions questions about course administration or content should be posted to the newsgroup, not e-mailed to me. You should read the syllabus, the assigned reading, and review the lecture outline before class. The current course syllabus can be found on the Kellogg syllabus respository.

Course Description

Accelerated Corporate Finance (ACF) covers the fundamental financial knowledge you need to run a firm, whether the firm is a multi-billion dollar international conglomerate or a three-person start up. ACF covers the material from Finance 1 and Finance 2 in an intensive one-quarter course. Given the pace of the course, students are expected to be prepared to put in the extra effort in class and outside of class. This is a challenging course. Students that truly want to succeed and are willing to put in the extra effort are successful in this class. In this class, you will learn how to answer the three fundamental questions of corporate finance.

  • Valuation. We will learn how to value projects (e.g. a new product launch) and firms. There are three basic ways to value a project (purchasing a firm or a security is a project): discounted cash flow, multiples, and real options.
  • Capital Structure. Capital structure is the logic of how firms finance their projects (using debt or equity, public or private capital) as well as how they manager risk (e.g. with derivatives).
  • Payout Policy. Payout policy is the logic of when firms should retain cash flow in the firm opposed to paying it out to shareholders and if they should pay it out in what form (e.g. dividends or stock repurchases).

Once you understand how to ask and answer these three questions you will have framework for answering essentially any corporate finance question you will face in your career. The logical concepts will be covered in class. Technical skills and intuition will be developed in class and through online exercises. The logic and tools youhave learned will then be applied to a set of valuation, financing, risk management, and payout cases. Basic finance knowledge (discounting) and accounting is assumed. The course is designed both for managers who will be directly involved in making or analyzing financial decisions (e.g., future senior executives, general managers, investment bankers, consultants, securities analysts, money managers, investment advisors) as well as managers who will initially specialize in a different functional area (e.g., marketing, operations) but expect to rise to positions of leadership that span diciplines.

Canvas

Canvas: Essentially all of the online components of the class can be found on Canvas including: the class discussion group, the course calendar, the quizzes, and the gradebook. It will also be a portal to other non-Canvas online content. I have tried to design it so everything you need online can be accessed from Canvas. You will submit most of your assignments through Canvas. I have written a short tutorial for Canvas. Canvas help has much more extensive documentation.

Intellectual Property

The class notes and past exams are the intellectual property of the instructor. You may not distribute class notes electronically or in any form to anyone outside the class or outside Kellogg. You may not duplicate these notes for use by your employers after graduating from Kellogg without my written consent.

Honor Code

I expect that the honor code will be followed at all times. I trust that no one will give or receive assistance which gives them an unfair advantage over other students.