These four supplemental lectures to Prof. Alex Butler’s Financial Management course introduce undergraduate students to the use of AI assistants in financial management. As professionals increasingly delegate analysis to these tools, they will need to know how to supervise their work, state assumptions completely, specify the appropriate conventions, and verify their output. Each lecture applies these skills to a topic from the main course (time value of money, capital budgeting, modern portfolio theory, and derivatives) using Claude and Excel, with students independently verifying the analysis at each step.
This course introduces undergraduate students to the core concepts of corporate finance. The focus is on ways to maximize firm value through managerial choices about how to structure the left hand side of the firm’s balance sheet (asset or project selection) and the right hand side of the balance sheet (capital structure and external financing decisions) and how financial markets tie the two together. Decision makers in business need to know these concepts in order to make value-enhancing choices in their company. In this course, we study market efficiency, time value of money, capital budgeting, cash flow estimation, modern portfolio theory, capital asset pricing model, cost of capital, capital structure, raising external capital, and derivatives. We will make frequent use of Microsoft Excel, and developing applied skills in spreadsheet modeling of finance problems is a desired ancillary outcome for the course.