This is something I meant to do originally on my MBA-orientated weblog, but didn't get around to for Term 1 and 2 at MBS. I make heaps of posts referring to particular aspects of my courses, without ever providing an overview of what the course is actually about. So, over the next few days, I'll try to put together a summary of each of the courses that I'm doing at Columbia, together with my personal expectations / outcomes.
B8301 - Advanced Corporate Finance (Professor E. R. Arzac)
Advanced Corporate Finance at Columbia is pretty much the equivalent of Corporate Finance at MBS. It is "a course on entrepreneurial and corporate finance dealing with the design of financial policy and the valuation of firms and financial instruments." More specifically, the course uses cases, mostly developed by the professor (rather than published through Harvard), to demonstrate free cash flows in domestic and international acquisitions, private equity and leveraged buy-outs, equity derivatives (options, futures, etc), real options, mergers & acquisitions, recapitalisations, and asset restructuring.
Enrique Arzac uses his own text and his own cases, which is unusual for an upper-level corporate finance course. From my understanding most b-schools have adopted Brealey & Myers' Principles of Corporate Finance as the standard textbook for corporate finance-orientated courses. However, Enrique's classes are always fully subscribed, and receive consistent student ratings around 6.5 out of 7.
I'm anticipating that I'll get a lot out of this course. Being a finance course, there's lots of numbers and formulas to learn, but untimately it's a course about how proceed with a big corporate finance deal; which approach to take, and how to deal with each of the stakeholders. Should be challenging, engaging, and maybe even a bit of fun.
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