The wide range of electives available enables you to gain a deeper knowledge of areas of special interest. You will be expected to complete five elective courses. Below are some examples of the electives that run during the 2010/11 course.
Please note that the elective courses offered for 2011 entry are subject to change.
Corporate valuation
The econometrics of predictability
Entrepreneurial finance
Financial reporting
Fixed income & derivatives
Industrial organization
International finance
International financial management
Mergers and acquisitions
Private equity
Trade & globalisation
Corporate valuation
Managers of firms have many responsibilities. A critical one is to ensure that the firm makes appropriate investment and financial decisions. This course focuses on how to make good decisions. While this course will focus to some extent on the mechanics of corporate valuation, it is more directly a course on how to create (and destroy) corporate value. As such, I am more interested in the decisions you make after you have conducted the valuation analysis.
Who should take this class? Consultants, entrepreneurs, general managers, marketers, investment bankers and other finance professionals — basically, if you’re interested in business, you should take this class.
Entrepreneurial finance
The Entrepreneurial Finance elective aims to help future executives, facing financing and investment decisions in a broad range of entrepreneurial environments, to make better decisions and achieve better outcomes. The course covers all stages of the financing process from initial financial planning to harvesting value.
While the course will inevitably involve looking at a number of technology driven businesses the emphasis is on gaining insights into the entrepreneurial financing process rather than looking at the financing of technology businesses per se.
Entrepreneurial environments considered will include not just young, growing, independent businesses but also those around the buy-outs and spin-outs of units from more established businesses as well as entrepreneurial joint ventures that are established with a view to their becoming independently viable entrepreneurial businesses in their own right.
One of the eight sessions will also be devoted to looking at the venture capital industry with a view to providing candidates with a broad understanding of current developments in this area and the likely future impact on the range of financing options and alternatives available from these sources going forward.
The course requires candidates to be very comfortable with and confident in using basic financial concepts. The course is designed to focus on the numbers and analytic techniques for gaining insight, although continual attention will also be paid to the incentives facing each of the parties in the financing process.
The course will be highly relevant for future executives who may be involved in an entrepreneurial venture at some point in their careers, whether in a turnaround, a management buy-out, a young company or a start-up. The course will also be highly applicable for future private equity and venture capital decision makers.
Fixed income & derivatives
The course will develop the analytical tools necessary to understand and price fixed income and derivatives financial instruments. The properties of these financial instruments will be analysed and related to risk management, portfolio diversification, systemic risk, financial fragility and contagion. Emphasis will be put on applying these techniques on problems emerging in the marketplace.
Topics to be covered include: bond valuation, properties and trading; swaps; risky debt; fixed income and hedging applications; the yield curve; derivatives markets; properties and trading; derivatives pricing and hedging applications; Black-Scholes Model; real options, credit derivatives and securitisation, credit derivatives and financial stability.
Private equity
Throughout the year there are many different seminars, events and conferences involving private equity professionals and those faculty researching in the area. These provide a useful introduction to the sector, and essential background knowledge for students taking the private equity course.
There are three main objectives of the private equity course:
- To develop an understanding of the roles played by the various participants involved in private equity. The course will consider the attractions of private equity as an investment class. The organisation and incentive structures of private equity funds, and the complex relationship with the companies in which they invest are also analyzed.
- To apply many of the ideas and theories developed in the core finance courses to a particular sector of the financial industry. The private equity sector – involving both venture capital and buy-outs – is a particularly interesting sector to analyze. Private equity is used to finance many companies where the generic problems encountered when financing companies – such as uncertainty or asymmetric information – are especially acute and complex.
- To critically evaluate the valuation techniques employed in private equity transactions. By their very nature, private equity investments (which lack market valuations provided by public equity markets) are those where valuation is often difficult, being highly sensitive to assumptions and methodology. This course reviews a variety of valuation techniques in the context of real private equity transactions.
Mergers, acquisitions and restructuring
The market for corporate ownership is one of the hallmarks of capitalism. Within that market, vast amounts of corporate wealth have been created – and destroyed. The objective of this course is to understand the market, the institutions that were created in order to execute these complicated transactions and the strategies that are employed by the major players.
One role of the market is to allocate assets to the owners who can extract the maximum value out of them; bankruptcy is an alternative mechanism. Hence, the two mechanisms are often studied together under the heading of restructuring.
The first four sessions are taught by Oren Sussman and would focus on finance. Subsequently, Duncan Angwin will teach four additional sessions that would focus on Strategy and Organisational Behaviour.