Introduction to Corporate Finance

Welcome to Introduction to Corporate Finance! This first module will introduce you to one of the most important foundational concepts in Finance, the time value of money. Before diving into the Video lectures, I encourage you to take a look at the brief pre-reading for the course. Specifically, have a look at “Big Picture Course Motivation,” for additional motivation and context for the course, “Time Value of Money Overview,” for a motivation and context for our first topic, and “Quiz Problem Answer Input.” This last note is particularly important to avoid confusion with the problem sets. Then, go to the Video Lectures and start learning Finance!

In this module, we wrap up the Time Value of Money topic with a discussion of inflation before moving on to our second topic, Interest Rates, and introducing our third topic, Discounted Cash Flow Analysis. By the end of this module, you should feel comfortable with discounting and compounding arbitrary cash flow streams in order to value different claims and make better financial decisions.

This module continues our discussion of discounted cash flow analysis by way of a capital budgeting case. (You might want to download or view the Excel file, “Tablet Case Spreadsheet.xlsx,” that I use in the lectures, but it is not necessary for understanding the material.) By the end of this module, you should feel comfortable valuing claims and making financing decisions in which the timing of the cash flows and compounding of interest is arbitrary (e.g., annual, semi-quarterly, monthly, etc.). Having worked through the problems, you should also be more comfortable with real world financial decision making related to retirement savings, home financing and refinancing, auto leases, and other scenarios.