Latest update: December 5, 2019.
Office: D521 (Building 2)
Office hours: by appointment
The objective of this course is to introduce the main concepts and techniques of financial analysis, with a special focus on issues in corporate finance. By the end of the course, you will acquire knowledge and practice on firm/project valuation, capital structure decisions and value creation, and corporate financing. The covered topics include: (i) the net present value and other investment rules; (ii) principles of capital budgeting; (iii) long-term financing; (iv) capital structure and dividend policy; (v) corporate valuation; and (vi) cash and credit management.
The course requires some preliminary knowledge, such as accounting principles (items on the balance sheet of firms) and basic financial mathematics (net present value and compounding). Please refresh your mind with these concepts because in the classes I have no time to explain everything again. However, on the slides you will find some brief summary of these issues which may help.
The course description is also available in a pdf file.
In line with the Bologna standards, there is a continuous assessment of students. This has three elements:
You have two additional opportunities to pass: first and second final exams, each worth 100% of the final grade. Those who fail in the continuous evaluation can only try again in the second exam. Students that pass in the regular assessment system have the opportunity to improve their grades, but only in the second final exam. Enrolling for the first final exam is also possible through a written application to me, but in that case you lose your grade you already have.
Under either assessment regimes, to pass the course, your overall grade must be at least 9.5 (on a scale of 0 to 20).
The mid-term exam with solutions is available here: pdf.
For each part I provide you a set of cases and exercises which we will solve and discuss in class. Some of the cases are translated from Portuguese which are from the book
Barroso, C., Ferreira, M., Mota, A., and Nunes, J. P., 2010, Finanças Empresariais: Teoria e Prática, Sílabo, 3ª Edição..
The problem sets are the following:
For some topics I made Excel files that help the understanding of the concepts and the calculations:
Some past exams are available with solutions: (zip).
The main textbook for the course is