Department of Business Administration

Course schedule: Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, as listed in the course outline.

Goals

Students taking this course should expect to learn the nature and purposes of financial management. They will gain skills in investing techniques and financial management. They will learn, through seminar discussions and a hands-on project on financial forecasting and selection of financing products. In the end the goal is to apply the state-of-the-art techniques often used by finance directors and investment bankers.

Instructor

Prof. António Marques-Mendes
Office nr.: 417. Tel +351-239-790-548; Fax +351-239-790-413
Web site   Topics in Corporate Finance • E-mail student@marques-mendes.com

Lectures and seminars take place in the rooms assigned by BEDEL.

Tutorials and appointments are available by prior booking through email

Details on Marques Mendes' current research interests and availability to supervise MBA, Msc and PhD thesis can be found in his personal web page.

Pedagogy

The course employs cases and problems as well as classroom lectures and discussions. We will make use of international as well as domestic examples. Each student will be expected to participate actively in class discussions. A written project will be due by the end of term, to be discussed during an oral exam.

The Course on the Internet

We will make use of the Web for resource material and communication. Indeed this course outline itself will change: the definitive version is at  our Web site. All students must have an email address and Web access. Lecture materials, as available, can be downloaded from the Web. (In some cases you will need the Adobe Acrobat reader, Version 6 or higher, available free from Adobe's World Wide Web Site http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html.). To access the course site, use tcf2009 ID, and your 10-digit password (ask me to get it). Students are encouraged to exchange their own material by posting it to a shared file space.

To keep up with the world of corporate finance visit regularly the following sites:

• CNN Finance • The Financial Times • Yahoo Finance • Bloomberg • Reuters • CFO.com •Portal Gestão

• and much more at Marques-Mendes's Finance Resources Page

Text and cases

Richard Brealey and Stewart Myers, Principles of Corporate Finance, McGraw-Hill, New York. (Latest edition)

Mark Largan, International Corporate and Investment Banking - Practice and Law, Institute of Financial Services, Canterbury, UK. (Latest edition)

Students should have read the assignments before coming to class. Material covered in the assigned textbook readings will generally not be repeated in class. Rather, class time will be devoted to lecture and case discussion, applying the material covered in the readings.

Grading

Students must choose one of the following grading systems:

A - Standard assessment regime (written final exam )

B - Mixed assessment regime (available only for students with a minimum class attendance of 60%), includes:

• Class participation   5% 

• Individual project - Company Report 20%

• Group project - Type A/B projects 20%

• 1 Final written exam 15%  (Some students who did Type A projects may be exempt from this exam)

• Final oral examination 40%.

Students failing to pass through project work and oral examination can still register for the standard written examination, but are discouraged to do so because the pass rate is usually very low.