共12页

University of Illinois
College of Commerce and Business Administration
Finance 454: Corporate Finance Research
Professor Michael Weisbach
Spring 2004

This is an advanced course in corporate finance. Its goal is to bring Ph.D. students to the frontier
of knowledge so that they can start doing their own research in this field.
Since about the 1970's, researchers have realized that financial contracts are best viewed as part
of the nexus of contracts that make up the firm. To understand them, one must first understand
the firm's contractual nature. The course will begin with the classic Modigliani/Miller arguments,
and follow the literature in discussing the implications of violations of MM assumptions. We will
then study the traditional corporate finance issues, including financial distress, corporate payout
policy, and the capital acquisition process. We will then move into some topics that have become
prominent in the literature in recent years: interactions between product and capital markets,
corporate governance/control, special issues in governance/control raised by international
differences, and, finally, internal capital markets and the logic of diversification.

共12页

University of Illinois
College of Commerce and Business Administration
Finance 454: Corporate Finance Research
Professor Michael Weisbach
Spring 2004

This is an advanced course in corporate finance. Its goal is to bring Ph.D. students to the frontier
of knowledge so that they can start doing their own research in this field.
Since about the 1970's, researchers have realized that financial contracts are best viewed as part
of the nexus of contracts that make up the firm. To understand them, one must first understand
the firm's contractual nature. The course will begin with the classic Modigliani/Miller arguments,
and follow the literature in discussing the implications of violations of MM assumptions. We will
then study the traditional corporate finance issues, including financial distress, corporate payout
policy, and the capital acquisition process. We will then move into some topics that have become
prominent in the literature in recent years: interactions between product and capital markets,
corporate governance/control, special issues in governance/control raised by international
differences, and, finally, internal capital markets and the logic of diversification.