The New Corporate Finance

Rating:
Summary: Excellent summary of various aspects of corporate finance
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A good reference for motivated MBAs and practitioners
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A good reference for motivated MBAs and practitioners
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A good book of ARTICLES but too academic.
Review: Chew's New Corporate Finance is a quite decent book on journal articles on finance issues from a corporate standpoint. Other than your professor's own choice of favourite articles, Chew's may be the next best thing you can get. I won't give it a higher rating (4 or 5 star) because it lacks ground-breaking yet still easy-to-read articles from the less technical journals like Harvard Business Review, etc.

Most of the articles are too academic coming from more or less the same journals. Moreover, the more technical ones have difficult formulas and number-crunching statistics which are more appropriate for MBA and MSc in Finance students, or those in researchers in "high-level derivative work".

I have the second edition (1999) of this book and used it sparingly for my MBA in Finance. And I've browsed through this new edition - what I found was there were not many changes made, only a few new articles have been added. Perhaps inclusion of some non-American articles would do justice to this book. Chew still keeps the classic ones though, which are always relevant. The roundtable discussion on EVA is interesting but Chew does not include criticisms on EVA shortfalls or problems.

On the whole, this text should be a reasonable introduction to high-level Finance and also a good supplementary reading for those doing MBA in Finance. But the editor's selection between technical and easy-to-read-but-important articles still leaves much to be desired.....

Rating:
Summary: practical as well as academic
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: practical as well as academic
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Very good collection of "Lectures"
Review: This book is for those who already understand corporate finance basics. It is a collection of papers by famous and not-so-famous authors, exploring capital structure, investment policy, risk managemt, corporate financial restructuring and other nice details on the new thoughts of corporate finance. It is indispensible for those dealing with the subject, as a mean to refresh the concepts. Can bee seen as a set of separate lectures. Lacks a bit of structure and guidance when you need to attack a problem, since some articles subjects overlap. Definetely worth the price.

Rating:
Summary: Extremely useful and well written, if somewhat partisan work
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The New Corporate Finance
Review: This very well written book in question , i.e., The New Corporate Finance by Donald H Chewis is comprised of numerous articles written by top researchers and theorists in finance. The text is meant to bridge the gap between financial theory and practice. It gives instructors a way to introduce students to academic articles edited to eliminate the methodological content. I loved it. 5/5.