Corporate Finance

What is Corporate Finance? It�s all corporate finance. My unbiased view of the world Every decision made in a business has financial implications, and any decision that involves the use of money is a corporate financial decision. Defined broadly, everything that a business does fits under the rubric of corporate finance. It is, in fact, unfortunate that we even call the subject corporate finance, because it suggests to many observers a focus on how large corporations make financial decisions and seems to exclude small and private businesses from its purview. A more appropriate title for this discipline would be Business Finance, because the basic principles remain the same, whether one looks at large, publicly traded firms or small, privately run businesses. All businesses have to invest their resources wisely, find the right kind and mix of financing to fund these investments, and return cash to the owners if there are not enough good investments. In this introduction, we will lay the foundation for this discussion by listing the three fundamental principles that underlie corporate finance—the investment, financing, and dividend principles—and the objective of firm value maximization that is at the heart of corporate financial theory.
The Firm: Structural Set-Up In corporate finance, we will use firm generically to refer to any business, large or small, manufacturing or service, private or public. Thus, a corner grocery store and Microsoft are both firms. The firm�s investments are generically termed assets. Although assets are often categorized by accountants into fixed assets, which are long-lived, and current assets, which are short-term, we prefer a different categorization. The assets that the firm has already invested in are called assets in place, whereas those assets that the firm is expected to invest in the future are called growth assets. Though it may seem strange that a firm can get value from