FIN549 Corporate finance and industrial organization

• Topics

  The primary topics of the course concern the interaction between the firm’s real decisions and its financial decisions in different equilibrium industrial organization settings. This course involves a fair amount of microeconomics and industrial organization in addition to finance. Both theoretical articles and empirical articles will be covered and discussed. We will emphasize the link between theoretical and empirical research in both industrial organization and corporate finance. Moreover, the course will deal with big data and computational linguistics.

• Learning outcome

  After taking the course students should be able to do the following.

  Knowledge:

  • Analyze the various links between a firm's financing decisions and its product market environment
  • Critically evaluate the relationship between a firm's financing decisions and the theory of the firm
  • Examine frontier research on M&A as well as computational linguistics and finance

  Skills:

  • Critically read, assess, and present recent research in corporate finance
  • Formulate new problems/models within the field of corporate finance

  General competence:

  • Read and discuss research papers in the area

• Teaching

  5 sessions, taught in person on campus, on Aug 22 to 23 as well as Aug 31 to Sept 2

• Restricted access

  All participants must have successfully completed a PhD-level corporate finance course.

  • PhD candidates from NHH, who meet this requirement, can take this course.
  • The course is open to external PhD students. But notice the background requirements.

  Participation by PhD students who meet this requirement but are not enrolled in the NHH PhD program is subject to approval by the Department of Finance.

• Required prerequisites

  Course participants must have successfully completed a PhD-level course in corporate finance to take this course.

• Assessment

  Students must turn in a 2-page write-up on 1 article each session, beginning with the 2nd session. The course grade will be based on these hand-in written "referee reports" (50%) (4 total write-ups), participation in class with 2 presentations (30%), and a course exam which will consist of each student presenting either their own existing paper or a new paper idea based on the class (20%).

• Grading Scale

  Pass/fail

• Literature

  A number of articles will be assigned.