3 semester credits

The focus of this course is on how students use financial information for internal decision-making purposes. It is designed for the leader who will be using, rather than producing, financial information. Decision making is an art. Good decision makers need to be able to anticipate the alternatives, evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each, and recognize the tradeoffs inherent in each alternative. Students in this course will approach financial decision making using this framework that also overtly includes rigorous stakeholder analysis and implications. Stakeholder analysis sometimes leads to controversial decision alternatives, but it is this exercise that will develop the students' talents for challenging the traditional and finding the balance between stakeholder expectations and creating opportunity for the organization. The objective of this course is for students to apply finance theory and principles to the analysis of important business problems. Specific topics will include capital budgeting, cost of capital, real options, capital structure, payout policy, and enterprise valuation.