Financial Decision Analysis

Course Structure

1. Financial Analysis and Modelling: This will enable you to gain a critical awareness of the financial environment from both an accounting and finance perspective. You will learn to understand, analyse and interpret company reports, examine the role of the regulatory framework for corporate reporting and the stock market, and explore the pricing of securities. You will also cover the key areas of decision and risk analysis, alongside the process of decision making, key statistical concepts, and selecting and using appropriate analytical software tools as aids to decision making.
2. Strategic Business Planning and Control: You will start on this unit by considering the internal perspectives of the firm in areas such as business planning and control including issues such as budgeting, the design of management control systems and the development of spreadsheet-based decision support systems. You will then build on this foundation by developing a more strategic corporate perspective. You will explore the relationships between strategy, strategic management and strategic management accounting and set the latter in the context of the historical development of management accounting in general.
3. Managerial Finance and Financial Markets: You will be introduced to key theoretical issues relating to financial markets and institutions, investments and corporate financial management and their practical applications and limitations. The areas covered will encompass shareholder value and the goals of the firm and the process of shareholder value creation, project evaluation and the discounted cash flow model, capital market theories including the efficient markets hypotheses and the ideas of modern portfolio theory. From this core understanding you will move on to look at the psychological, institutional and agency theory factors that impact upon financial markets. You will consider key empirical research on the explanatory and predictive power of models in the context of implementing investment strategies. This will be assisted by guided critical analysis of research and analysis of live data.
4. Corporate Finance and Valuation: This unit will give you the opportunity to consider the primary financial decisions of the firm focussing on advanced capital budgeting techniques and the strategic analysis of capital investment decisions, capital structure theories and financing policy, and dividend policy. You will appraise theories in the context of empirical research to facilitate critical understanding of the issues. Advanced study in business valuation will give you a practical understanding and further enable you to apply key professional techniques, which is particularly relevant for mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings and private equity transactions.
5. Research Methods and Dissertation: This is a scheme of independent research. We offer comprehensive training via lectures and workshops throughout the year to develop skills commensurate with standards of good research practice. On completing this programme you will be ideally placed to develop your own research projects and work within professional research teams.