Customer Reviews

The New Corporate Finance

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As the title of the book clearly indicates, the text advances corporate finance beyond the theory presented in texts like Brealy and Myers. Thus, the text is geared towards a more sophisticated reading audience. In a collection of articles, academics and finance practitioners discuss the real world impact of capital budgeting, dividend/share repurchase policy, financial innovations (e.g. convertibles, commodity-linked bonds, derivatives, etc.), and bankruptcy on firms. Do not be scared off by the "academic" nature of this text. Unlike academic journals, the long-winded discussions on hypothesis testing and experimentation are abandoned (along with the high-level mathematics). The articles are very readable and any empirical evidence is presented in relatively friendly charts and graphs, which do a great job at providing the proper intuition. More importantly, the authors usually include real world anecdotal evidence to support the conclusions, as well.

This collection of articles from the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance is extremely well-presented and eschews a lot of the overly technical analyses and explanations that poulate other works. The concept of Economic Value Added or EVA is explained in quite practical terms as are the main corporate finance principals to which most readers will have been exposed through other texts.

What is extremely useful is that the editors have brought in some top managers to discuss the implementation of EVA and EVA-related systems. While these have generally been success stories, it it these outsiders who address the limitations of the system, effectively strengthening its application.

The Stern-Stewart team has the zeal of evangelists and while this approach may be off-putting to those who like their corporate finance rarefied and dry, it does hammer the main points home.

The academics, including Michael Jensen, Stewart Myers, Fischer Black and one of the godfathers of modern corporate finance, Noble laureate Merton Miller, present overviews and long term evaluation of their own work in terms understandable to most laymen. While not presenting any original work, as a collection this is definitely a worthwhile addition to any corporate finance student or practitioner.

Any corporate manager interested in a system that reconciles incentives and rewards should also give this book a read.

An excellent compilation of articles by top academicians in the field of corporate finance. The articles are ideal for a person who wants to get a good grasp of any area of Corporate Finance. Warning: This is definitely not for the beginners. It is ideal for practitioners who are interested in learning more.

This book challenges you about what you really understand on finance. Before I read this I didn't like finance at all because it seemed too simplified. This book shows how the real world and people think. Especially, its chapter on risk is of a great help. Now I'm interested in some fields of finance such as internal corporate governance, real option, more refined and practical concepts than EVA, etc.