Product Description

This textbook represents the cutting edge of what the top scholars and practitioners know about finance--at long last made practical and accessible. It is a corporate book, yet it is cutting edge investment theory, presenting the forefront on interpreting what the data says about the theories, cutting edge on risk management, capital budgeting, and on the issues that need to be considered to determine both a firm's proper mix of debt and equity financing and its value maximizing dividend policy. It tells the practitioner/student how to do it and is the first book to teach, with careful step-by-step pedagogy, and how to think for themselves about it. The goal of this text, and this revision in particular, is to present the material in as simple and accessible manner as possible without glossing over the important details. Rather than organizing the text around financial theory and then thinking about potential applications, the authors began by thinking about finance practice, and then organized the book around the tools needed to create value in the financial management of a corporation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63902 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 880 pages

From the Publisher
Examples have been updated, vignettes changed, numbers modified and statements checked for currency and historical accuracy, and exercises and examples have been modified or added to so that the text is even more practical, pedagogically effective and current.
Very practical text, with many real world examples embedded throughout. Each chapter opens with a real-world vignette to motivate students to learn the issues in the respective chapter.
Each chapter includes a set of learning objectives to help the student understand what should be learned and mastered from each chapter.
Virtually every chapter includes numerous examples and case studies, some hypothetical and some real, that help students gain insight into some of the most interesting and sophisticated realms of financial theory and practice.
Major results and key words and concepts are highlighted throughout each chapter. In addition, the functional use of color is deliberately and carefully done in order to call out important topics.
Practical Insights is a feature that contains unique guidelines to help students identify the important practical issues faced by the financial manager and where to look in that part of the text to help analyze those issues. This feature enables the book to serve as a reference as well as a primer on finance. Practical Insight boxes are located at the end of each of the six parts.
Executive Perspective feature provides the reader with testimonials from important financial executives, who have looked over parts of the book and highlight what issues and topics are especially important from the practicing executive's perspective. Examples include Myron S. Scholes, Thomas E. Copeland, David C. Shimko. These are also found at the end of each of the six parts, just after the Practical Insights feature.
Increased accessibility through careful topic selection (both deletions of content as well as additional new content).
A new brief section on private equity in Chapter 3, Equity Financing.
Some of the more difficult mathematical material has been cut, and made less intimidating by using narrative discussion vs. mathematical formulas, such as chapter five's discussion of mean-variance analysis.
Chapter 7 includes a new discussion about the lessons learned from the fate of Long Term Capital Management. It also includes a section about market frictions and their implications for derivative securities pricing and the management of derivatives portfolios.
Chapter 8 includes an expanded section on covered interest rate parity.
New Chapter 9: Discounting and Valuation This chapter was created based on reviewer feedback asking for a chapter that covers the key ingredients of valuation: accounting, cash flows, and basic discounting
Chapter 10 provides a more in-depth discussion of the equivalent annual cost approach and has several new results.
Chapter 11 has an expanded discussion of the distinction between firm betas and project betas and provides several new explanations for why these might differ.

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.

Customer Reviews

Useful to pass an exam but not too so in the real world
This book is recommended as part of a course in Finance at the LSE which is why I got it (Amazon being the only place I could find it). It has some good parts and explains concepts quite well but seems to lack a more intuitive approach that seems detached from the real world (such is the nature of Academia I guess!). It can be quite wordy and occasionally uses mathematical parts that seem to be there for the sake of it. Having said that, there are some useful examples. My biggest problem is that graphs are occasionally removed from their explanations so you can get all confused looking at the wrong figure. However, the best thing about this book is that, at the end of each chapter there are the key points. So if you're lazy like me, you don't need read all the useless bits but instead find what you're looking for at the end and then refer back to relevant bit (which is marked clearly in the chapter) if you want more explanation. Quite a good book on the whole but not exactly bed time reading, I recommend it if you want to pass a more advanced undergraduate exam and actually know what you're talking about

David Hillier Financial Markets and Corporate Strategy
At last! A complex subject matter that has been explored and explained in an absorbing and alluring manner. This book affords a fascinating insight with often amusing practical examination and I would advocate this to be a 'must-have' purchase for any teacher / practitioner / student in this field or indeed from any related fields.

Not only an updated edition of this publication, but I would suggest an upgraded edition that endures to offer and indeeed succeeds in supplying an advancement of this subject matter.

Refreshing approach to Finance.
I am currently undertaking a course in Finance and have just purchased this book. It is exactly what I was after...its very well written, clear and concise, and has a refreshing approach to learning corporate finance.
I would thoroughly recommend it.