This course is a strategy course that will examine the intersection of strategy and finance. The core issues in Strategy is to understand performance differences between firms, and variation in the persistence of performance differences. A core issue in Finance is to understand how firms finance their operations and investments - including those responsible for creating superior or inferior performance. From this it follows that the complementarity between strategy and finance is potentially great.
Unfortunately then, strategists typically have insufficient understanding of finance, and finance specialists typically have insufficient understanding of strategy. In strategy there is a tendency to brush aside finance and financial resources as strategically uninteresting, because financial markets are considered to be too efficient to have much potential to explain performance differences. Conversely, in finance, there is usually no deep understanding of how performance differences are created, maintained and destroyed.
This course aims to exploit the complementarity between strategy and finance, seen from the strategy side. The key themes are I) the creation and erosion of competitive advantage II) boundaries of the firm (e.g. diversification, M&As, alliances, etc.) III) Competitive dynamics (selection processes, technological- and financial shocks, etc). On each of these classic strategy topics we will add relevant insights from finance to the insights from strategy, and examine interaction between the two.
Topics include (but are not limited to):
- Factor market imperfections
- Capital market imperfections
- R&D and Innovation
- Organizational- and human capital
- M&A's, diversification and ownership
- Entrepreneurship
- Corporate governance
- Economic- and financial shocks
- Technological shocks