What we have here instead is a very helpful collection/summary of material on the institutional framework of corporate finance -- the kind of stuff you might wish your students knew before they ever started the technical part. Short of that, it has another good use: it's what you might call a "bottom drawer" book, i.e., one of the books the professor keeps in the bottom drawer to deploy for classroom examples -- thereby garnering an undeserved reputation for breadth of knowledge. This can only be bad news for the publishers: it means they sell only one copy rather than a whole classroom full of copies.

I can only conclude that the publishers understand their own business better than I understand their business: maybe there is a market for whole classrooms full of copies, and more power to them if they find it. Meanwhile, I cherish my bottom drawer copy and I look forward to many more occasions when I can stun and astonish with the authors' good help.

3 of 3 found the following review helpful:


Really quite good. Four stars only because it is so specialized.  Jul 01, 2006 By Craig Matteson
This is not a book in advanced financial topics such as options or mathematical evaluations of arcane financial topics. It is a very interesting and well written book on various topics managers need to know to well manage the financial aspects of their organization. Of course, since it is about finance there are numbers and some equations, but nothing very complicated. What I especially enjoyed about the book was its consideration of alternatives, including negative outcomes, for managers making decisions. It also discusses conflicts of interest among various parties and the managers role and responsibilities in dealing with them and the considerations one must take as a shareholder, manager, or creditor (they all have different interests at times).

The book has nineteen chapters grouped into five parts. The parts are: I) Corporate Finance (a review of your basic corporate finance course - or a brief overview before you dive in a bit deeper water in this book), II) Analysis of the Firm and the Valuation of Equity and Debt, III) Managing Equity and Debt, IV) The Markets for Corporate Control (a fascinating portion of the book), and V) is just one chapter, Organizational Architecture, Risk Management, and Security Design.

This is a long book and some parts are quite detailed. Depending on your background, you can dive into it here or there looking for various topics. Since there is no glossary nor very many helps along the way, the book assumes a basic understanding of finance and corporate structure and finance (though the first part helps establish some groundwork in the latter). If you have had the core course from a good program in finance and corporate finance, you will handle this book well. If you enjoyed those courses, you will likely find this book quite interesting as I did.

Each chapter has its own problems and questions (selected answers are provided at the end of the book for a few of these in each chapter), a section containing issues for creative thinking, and a few projects for analysis. Some of the chapters have an appendix or two discussing the more numeric aspects of the chapter, but none are too deep. For example, Appendix A in chapter 10 on corporate bonds discusses yield to maturity and duration. Again, you probably covered this in your core course on finance. If not, you get the basic treatment here.

I think this is a worthwhile book for business professionals involved in finance in any way. It is on my shelf of books on corporate finance.

1 of 1 found the following review helpful:


Good and useful book for beginner of PhD student majoring in Finance  Jan 19, 2009 By H., YU-TING
I bought this book since I need to review papers about dividend policy, which are in Chapter 14.
This book provides the knowledge on the topics from the Lintner's smoothing model to signaling, agency costs, and etc., which helps me reorganize what I have read from journal papers.
But I have to suggest the publisher about the quality of the book since the book binding is so bad that pages are easy to unbind, which makes me disappointed because I prefer to keep the book clean and tidy.


A Small Masterpiece  Jan 18, 2012 By David Tufte
I read this book cover to cover last year (FYI: I used to work with one of the authors, and I thought I owed him that, even if took me several years to get around to it).

I found the book comprehensive, interesting, and at points, innovative.

There really are two books here.

In one, basic finance is laid out with a heavy use of options for insight. The options examples are not daunting, but they do require some basic exposure to options pricing to get much out of. Immersion in options at the start of the text is a fruitful way to go, although it does make the material a bit less accessible. Perhaps that's where the "advanced" in the title comes from.

In the second, there is a literature survey (a bit dated now). The book contains dozen (maybe hundreds) of excerpts from published papers. Essentially, the current research (as of publication in 2002), told in the words of the researchers themselves. Again, a very fruitful approach.

I am not sure about the usefulness of this book for a particular class, but as a general resource for any advanced program in finance, it's definitely worth considering. I strongly agree with the one reviewer who called it a "bottom of the drawer" book: one that will always be close at hand because of its utility.

The book has one weakness: the paperback copy I have does not contain a bibliography of cited works.


Advanced Corporate Finance  Jan 02, 2008 By Rachelle Gray "Book Worm"
This book arrived and was received at the speed, as well as condition stated by the book seller.

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