September 9, 2020
The Graduate Admission Office of NYU Shanghai held a webinar in English on September 9th. Professor Guodong Chen from MS in Quantitative Finance program was invited as the guest speaker for the webinar. He shared a detailed introduction of his course of Corporate Finance, including an overview about the course design, learning objectives, as well as the career prospects for students in the program.
Professor Guodong Chen is the Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU and Assistant Professor of Finance at NYU Shanghai. He taught Corporate Finance this fall for our MSQF program. Professor Chen holds a PhD from University of Michigan with research areas mainly focusing on Consumer Finance, Finance, Banking, and Corporate Finance.
Professor Chen started the talk with the most basic question, “What is Corporate Finance?” The answer was surprisingly simple, it is everything you know related to the corporate level decisions. To further interpret the answer, Professor Chen focused on three major topics: investment decision, financing decisions, and corporate governance.
Investment decisions, also called capital budgeting or project valuation, in short, picking up the right project to invest on. The CEO of the company might need to choose between putting money into building more factories or into R&D expenditures, an example of decisions between tangible versus intangible assets. Another special case is about Mergers and Acquisitions, so whether the CEO wants to buy another firm or not. Those decision processes should include but are not limited to the considerations of the target company, budget bid, possible competitive bidders and so on.
Regarding the investment decisions, financing decisions could be made to get the best funding sources. For instance, if we have enough cash, we could make a direct investment; if we don’t, we have to refer to external funds. After taking the course, students will have a thorough understanding about how to make these financial decisions and what determines the optimal capital structure.
Back to the course topic, the corporation itself is the core regarding those investment and financing decisions. Corporate governance is the design of the managerial structure within the firm, which includes how to incentivize employees to devote effort and work hard, hence enhancing their productivity.
By explaining each topic, Professor Chen pointed out that the best combination of those three factors makes the best financing strategy. By taking the Corporate Finance course within the MSQF students will be able to instill a solid financial intuition, develop various corporate finance problem solving tools, understand the effect of “real-world” frictions on corporate finance decisions, and handle actual corporate finance related projects.
Professor Chen also invites many guest speakers to give lectures throughout the course to talk about their personal and professional experiences and the roles they have played under different job titles. A wide range of topics would be covered and various job opportunities will be introduced to students to pursue for their future career development.
Q&A
Q: Will we have access to Bloomberg terminals during the program?
A: Bloomberg provides a lot of business and finance information and databases. NYU Shanghai has a few terminals at our library, so students would have the access. Other than Bloomberg terminals, which are more about the international market in general, we also have a few terminals of Wind (spelled as “Wan De” in Chinese Pinyin, which can be seen as a Chinese version of Bloomberg), which mainly focuses on Chinese market. Students would have the access to the Wind terminals at the library as well.
Q: Will the class examples mainly focus on China or will the perspectives would be more broad-based?
A: Since the background of our students is diverse, we will learn about international marketing in general. In-class examples will be a combination of both.
Q: Are there any recruiting or networking sessions when industry speakers come to the lecture?
A: Yes. I just had a conversation with our program director today about a guest speaker, who is a CFO in charge of the Eastern Pacific region from a SP 500 company. He asked for the email contact of our career development center and wanted to build up further connections to see if there’s a potential for future recruitment. I would say there is definitely a possibility. If you enroll in this program in the future, I would strongly recommend you to attend the guest speaker sessions and explore all the opportunities.