Customer Reviews

Behavioral Corporate Finance (McGraw-Hill/Irwin Series in Finance, Insurance, and Real Est)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is very informative and easy to read. It is written in a way that won't bore you at all. I have tried to read several books about behavioral finance but I found out they're either too long or boring which made me lose interest in the first chapter. Though, with this book, it didn't happen as it is well-written and very interesting. The examples, given to illustrate the points were quite interesting and simple to understand. I very much enjoyed reading about behavioral finance and the biases that managers, investors and financial analysts have when making their decisions. The book is divided into 11 chapters. I highly recommend this books for people who want to know more about behavioral finance.

1. Behavioral Foundations
2. Valuation
3. Capital Budgeting
4. Perceptions about Risk & Return.
5. Inefficient Markets and Corporate Decisions
6. Capital Structure
7. Dividend Policy
8. Agency Conflicts and Corporate Governance
9. Group Process
10. Mergers & Acquisitions
11. Applications of Real-option techniques to Capital Budgeting and Capital Structure(only available at the book's site)

I am an undergraduate student majoring in finance. This book is the prescribed reading of my course -- behavioral finance.

This text is a treatise on the impact of behavioral issues on, specifically, corporate finance. Thus, one should not expect to find elaborate discourse on capital budgeting, mergers & acquisition, dividend policy, etc. Rather, this book begins with describing the various biases, heuristics and framing effects. It then attempts to explain how judgments and choices made by managers reflect such behavioral issues.

While this field of finance is relatively infant, the author was able to apply the growing knowledge of the field widely onto various aspects of corporate finance. However, arguments illustrating behavioral issues exhibited by managers lack cogency. Oftentimes, ideas are sporadically spread throughout a chapter, without predetermined structure. This makes for a painstaking and confusing read.

I would not recommend purchasing this book. Until a better text on behavioral finance is published, it would probably be better to settle for other non-textbook books if you are seeking general overall understanding of this subject. In terms of needing a textbook for a more scholastic approach to this topic, I can only recommend journal articles or the like for the time being.

For a required textbook for a college class, this was a very easy to read, interesting book. Short to the point chapters with good examples. Consider yourself lucky if this ends up being one of your required readings.

This book was required for a course on Corporate Finance. The focus, however, is on the psychological aspects of corporate financial decision-making, resulting in no useful formulae or job aids. The take-away from this book is that financial managers use intuition and heuristics as much and as generally successfully as by NPV analysis which constitute the traditional approach. I would not recommend this book as a text.

I was 100% pleased with my purchase. The book arrived in the advertised condition and arrived within 3 business days.