Financial Markets & Corporate Strategy [Hardcover]

Mark Grinblatt (Author), Grinblatt-Titman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0256099391 | ISBN-13: 978-0256099393 | Publication Date: September 1, 1997

This text, appropriate for Corporate Finance at either the undergraduate or graduate level, has been written in a way that makes it both intuitive and non-technical. This text, while rigourous, is both practical and very teachable.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mark Grinblatt, University of California at Los Angeles, Ph.D. Yale Mark Grinblatt is Professor of Finance at UCLA’s Anderson School, where he currently serves as chair of the Finance area, and where he began his career in 1981. He is also a director on the board of Salomon Swapco, Inc., a consultant to numerous firms, and serves as an associate editor of Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. From 1987 to 1989, Professor Grinblatt was a visiting professor at the Wharton School and while on leave from UCLA in 1989 and 1990, he was a vice-president for Salomon Brothers, Inc., valuing complex derivatives for the fixed income arbitrage trading group in the firm. Professor Grinblatt is a noted teacher at UCLA, having been awarded teacher of the year in 1993 for UCLA’s Fully-Employed MBA Program by a vote of the students. This award was based on his teaching of a course designed around early drafts of this textbook. Professor Grinblatt’s areas of expertise include investments, performance evaluation of fund managers, fixed income markets, corporate finance and derivatives.

Sheridan Titman, University of Texas at Austin, Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon Sheridan Titman holds the Walter W. McAllister Centennial Chair in Financial Services at the University of Texas. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a consultant to a number of firms. Professor Titman began his academic career in 1980 at UCLA, where he served as the department chair for the finance group and as the Vice Chairman of the UCLA management school faculty. He has designed executive education programs in corporate financial strategy at UCLA and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, based on material developed for this textbook. In the 1988-89 academic year Professor Titman worked in Washington, D.C., as the special assistant to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, where he analyzed proposed legislation related to the stock and future markets, leveraged buyouts and takeovers. Between 1992 and 1994, he served as a founding professor of the school of Business and Management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where his duties included the vice chairmanship of the faculty and chairmanship of the faculty appointments committee. From 1994 to 1997 he was the John J. Collins, S.J. Chair in International Finance at Boston College. Professor Titman’s areas of expertise include investments, performance evaluation of portfolio managers, corporate finance and real estate. He is an editor of the Review of Financial Studies and serves on the board of a number of other finance and real estate journals. He is a past director of the American Finance Association and a current director of the Asia Pacific Finance Association.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 864 pages
• Publisher: Irwin Professional Publishing (September 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0256099391
• ISBN-13: 978-0256099393
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 8.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #71,692 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Approach to Corporate Finance, April 11, 2005

By 

longhorn24 "longhorn24" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Financial Markets & Corporate Strategy (Hardcover)

I will admit this book does not take the standard approach to learning corporate finance. The authors discuss a wide variety of common topics, ranging from market models, option valuation, capital structure concepts and decisions, to more specialized topics such as corporate governance and financial risk management.

What is unique about this book, though, is that the authors encourage students to think about problems more broadly than one often sees in introductory texts and courses. For example, the authors encourage the use of decision trees (i.e. binomial models) to value a wide range of assets, not just stocks. If one can value a stock option using a binomial tree, why not use the same framework to value a plot of undeveloped real estate, an untapped mine, or any other "real option" owned by a company?

Another reason this text is excellent is because the authors include a vast survey of recent financial and economic literature relevant for the financial decision-maker. Highly developed markets depend on the signaling of information between investors and management, creditors and debtors, customers and suppliers, and so forth; understanding the implications of these interactions and their subsequent effects is of primary importance to decision-makers.

For example, the "pecking order" theory of capital structure is one of the most well-known concepts in finance, but nonetheless often misunderstood (if you want proof of this, why did investors respond so enthusiastically to every IPO in the late 1990's?). Instead of glossing over an explanation of the theory, the book thorougly explains it and provides problems where the reader can actually work through a simplified model that really reinforces the concept.

While this book served as a good introduction to a wide scope of problems in finance, it was most useful because it helped me to apply economic tools not just to solve but to understand financial problems. The use of decision trees in the simplified, binomial model setting helped me to understand option/project valuation and risk-netural valuation, the linchpin of no-arbitrage pricing. It also has perhaps the most thorough, lucid explanation of Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) I've seen anywhere- for a practitioner trying to understand factor models, this chapter alone makes the book worth it.

I understand that this is a very difficult book and that the problems are beyond what one may expect in a MBA-level course. Nonetheless, finance is an increasingly competitive field whose employers are starting to demand more analytical skills and intiution from recent graduates. In response to the reviewer who said this text is not suitable for CFA preparation, I do agree with that sentiment. First, the CFA program is designed for self-study that any motivated and capable professional can handle, while Grinblatt/Titman is clearly appropriate for a rigorous MBA-level sequence in corporate finance. Second, the CFA exam emphasizes asset valuation and portfolio management, while this book stresses financial decision-making from a manager's standpoint.

While I normally don't like reviews that justify their opinions by offering credentials, I also work on Wall Street and I find the concepts taught in this book to be quite relevant in handling real-world problems.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good basic overview of finance intersecting corp strategy, February 24, 2005

By 

Craig Matteson (Saline, MI) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Financial Markets & Corporate Strategy (Hardcover)

I bought this book as a recommended supplemental text for a course in Corporate Finance in the MBA program at the U of Michigan Business School. I am very glad to have this book on my shelf of financial books and have benefited from it more than once.

I can recommend it to you strongly by praising it for these reasons:

1) It puts practical flesh on the financial model bones you learned in your first course on finance. There are very good discussions of the basic and well-known fundamental theories and models, but the authors also share with us what tends to happen in the real world. And isn't that what each of us need to add to our theoretical thinking?

2) Each chapter has effective summarizing Key Concepts and Key Terms with plenty of problems to work through and a list of References and Additional Readings that enable the reader to dive deeper into the topic of the chapter just read.

3) The book is helpfully organized into six Parts that provide the framework for the discussion. Parts 1-3 are a review of "Financial Markets and Instruments", "Valuing Financial Assets", and "Valuing Real Assets". This foundation gives the student a good grounding in order to see how these principles are used in the work of managing the capital structure of a corporation. Parts 4-6 discuss the "Corporate Financial Structure", "Incentives, Information and Corporate Control", and "Risk Management". These last three sections are the real meat of the book and where a great deal of its value to the business student lies.

4) Each of the Parts has an effective and brief introduction that sets the tone for what is to be studied. Even better, at the end of each the six Parts there are two very helpful summary sections: "Practical Insights" and "Executive Perspective".

This is a specialized topic. But it is an important topic. This is a very good book that can help a serious student get grounded in some very important principals necessary to managing the financial issues facing every corporation. I recommend it.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A finance textbook full of errors and holes, May 6, 2005

By 

N. Shah - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Financial Markets & Corporate Strategy (Hardcover)

I am a postgraduate student in finance and this book is on my reading list for corporate finance. I must say that I am not very pleased with this book. First, it seems to skip around from chapter to chapter with no real logical organizational structure. Second, it is full of typos and mistakes -- some that are quite dangerous for a proper understanding of the material. Third, it does not develop fully the statistically techniques in Chapter 4 that it builds on in later chapters. This is a major problem in my opinion. What saves this book from the lowest rating is that it does discuss empirical studies and journal articles, and it does not do an entirely awful job about the more qualitative subjects like adverse selection and capitalization policy.

For what it's worth, I received my undergraduate degree at Wharton and am now at the London School of Economics. Instead of this book, I recommend Brealey and Myer's Principles of Corporate Finance. This is what I used as an undergraduate and is what seems to be the de facto textbook in the top undergraduate and MBA programs.

N.