Institute of Entrepreneurship and Finance

Teaching

The Institute for Entrepreneurship and Finance aims at conveying a comprehensive understanding of the challenges of contemporary financial and capital markets to students. With this aim in mind, the chair educates students in a targeted manner and promotes the development of their relevant skills. Courses offered by the institute include entry and advanced level courses for undergraduate as well as graduate students. Classes are held in English and German. The following courses are offered on a regular basis:

Corporate Finance
Course description & course objectives

Taking into account different theoretical perspectives, students are familiarized with the mathematical foundations of investment and financing and are enabled to apply the mathematical tools of finance. The mathematical foundations of investment analysis and capital budgeting lie at the heart of this course. In addition, different financing instruments (such as stocks, annuities and zero-coupon bonds) and their valuation are covered, as well as the issue of portfolio optimization. Students independently perform capital budgeting calculations and determine the cost of capital under conditions of uncertainty (CAPM, APT). Explanations of financing structures and financing problems based on agency theory are also considered at an introductory level. The course aims at enabling students to deal with the basic concepts of investment and financing, thus simultaneously sparking students’ interest in advanced level finance courses and laying the groundwork for those courses.

Advanced Issues in Finance
Course description & course objectives

This course considers the basic structure of financial systems and the setup of the most important elements of a financial system from multiple perspectives. It will also discuss, how financial crises emerge, what types of crises can be distinguished and what options the political system has for limiting the impact of such crises. The aim of this course is to reconstruct and analyse the current dramatic developments in the financial industry. Based on a solid understanding of the importance of financial institutions and instruments as well as their evaluation, the course will discuss recent changes in the financial industry and their consequences for the real economy.

Corporate Finance
Course description & course objectives

This course provides a broad overview of central issues in modern corporate finance, such as mergers and acquisitions, financial distress, incentives, dividend policy, corporate governance and empirical methods. The course will introduce students to theoretical concepts and empirical research and consider the central questions of corporate finance.
Students will utilize selected data sets to put their knowledge about the previously covered empirical methods for research on capital markets into practice. At the end of the course, students will have gained a basic understanding of the most important issues in theoretical and empirical corporate finance and of established research methods.

Entrepreneurial Finance
Course description & course objectives

The course discusses central issues in the area of “entrepreneurial finance”, such as the financing of newly founded and small enterprises in all phases of their “life cycle”. Entrepreneurial finance differs from traditional financing in many respects. Newly founded enterprises are usually dependent on external capital to finance their growth. Furthermore, asymmetric information and the small size of those enterprises prevents them from having direct access to the capital market, which is why the importance of alternative sources of financing, such as business angels, venture capital and private equity, has been increasing in recent years. The aim of this course is to introduce students to related theoretical concepts and to key actors in the market of entrepreneurial finance and venture capital. Special emphasis is placed on application-oriented methods regarding business plan compilation and company valuation. Towards the end of the course, students will take what they have learned a step further by participating in a simulation game, which puts them into the position of an entrepreneur in a start-up firm.

Contact

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