Corporate Finance MBA Spring 2021 - Session 2: Shareholders, Stakeholders and the End Game in Business

In this session, after a brief explanation of what the project will involve, we started the discussion of what the end game is in business. While corporate finance states it to be maximizing firm value, it is often practiced as maximizing stock price. To make the world safe for stock price maximization, we do have to make key assumptions: that managers act in the best interests of stockholders, that lenders are fully protected, that information flows to rational investors and that there are no social costs. We started on why one of these assumptions, that stockholders have power over managers, fails and we will continue ripping the Utopian world apart next class. Slides: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/podcasts/cfspr21/session2slides.pdf Post class test: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/cfovhds/postclass/session2test.pdf Post class test solution: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/cfovhds/postclass/session2soln.pdf