Advanced Corporate Finance

Rating:
Summary: Mistitled?
Review: This is a most interesting and instructive textbook, but I am not entirely clear just what its intended audience might be; I suspect it may be mistitled. From my perspective, the title "Advanced Corporate Finance" suggests some fairly heavy duty mathematics. In fact, there is nothing here of that sort; indeed the level of math is no higher and perhaps lower than you would find in a standard "basic finance text.

What we have here instead is a very helpful collection/summary of material on the institutional framework of corporate finance -- the kind of stuff you might wish your students knew before they ever started the technical part. Short of that, it has another good use: it's what you might call a "bottom drawer" book, i.e., one of the books the professor keeps in the bottom drawer to deploy for classroom examples -- thereby garnering an undeserved reputation for breadth of knowledge. This can only be bad news for the publishers: it means they sell only one copy rather than a whole classroom full of copies.

I can only conclude that the publishers understand their own business better than I understand their business: maybe there is a market for whole classrooms full of copies, and more power to them if they find it. Meanwhile, I cherish my bottom drawer copy and I look forward to many more occasions when I can stun and astonish with the authors' good help.

Rating:
Summary: Mistitled?
Review: This is a most interesting and instructive textbook, but I am not entirely clear just what its intended audience might be; I suspect it may be mistitled. From my perspective, the title "Advanced Corporate Finance" suggests some fairly heavy duty mathematics. In fact, there is nothing here of that sort; indeed the level of math is no higher and perhaps lower than you would find in a standard "basic finance text.

What we have here instead is a very helpful collection/summary of material on the institutional framework of corporate finance -- the kind of stuff you might wish your students knew before they ever started the technical part. Short of that, it has another good use: it's what you might call a "bottom drawer" book, i.e., one of the books the professor keeps in the bottom drawer to deploy for classroom examples -- thereby garnering an undeserved reputation for breadth of knowledge. This can only be bad news for the publishers: it means they sell only one copy rather than a whole classroom full of copies.

I can only conclude that the publishers understand their own business better than I understand their business: maybe there is a market for whole classrooms full of copies, and more power to them if they find it. Meanwhile, I cherish my bottom drawer copy and I look forward to many more occasions when I can stun and astonish with the authors' good help.