Course Outline

The course provides insights into the empirical analysis of firms’ financing and investment decisions.
We discuss theoretical foundations of long-term financing, capital structure choice, cost of capital determination, capital market efficiency, and corporate takeover decisions as well as respective empirical findings.
Moreover, you will learn how to build financial models, handle financial data, and conduct financial analyses using the statistical software R.

Readings

• Mark J. Bennett and Dirk L. Hugen, Financial Analytics with R: Building a Laptop Laboratory for Data Science, Cambridge University Press 2016
• Espen Eckbo (ed.), Handbook of Corporate Finance: Empirical Corporate Finance, Volumes 1 & 2, 2007, North-Holland
• Jakob de Haan, Sander Oosterloo, and Dirk Schoenmaker, Financial Markets and Institutions, 3rd edition, 2015, Cambridge University Press
• Hillier, Ross, Westerfield, Jaffe, and Jordan, Corporate Finance, European edition, 2013 (2nd ed.), 2016 (3rd ed.), or 2020 (4th ed.)
• Clifford S. Ang, Analyzing Financial Data and Implementing Financial Models Using R, Springer 2015 (ebook)

Further readings may be announced during the course.