Postgraduate Course: Business Finance (EMBA) (CMSE11274)

Course Outline
School	Business School	College	College of Humanities and Social Science
Credit level (Normal year taken)	SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate)	Availability	Not available to visiting students
SCQF Credits	10	ECTS Credits	5
Summary	This course builds on your foundation course in finance. It will provide you with a good understanding of the key decisions a chief finance officer (CFO) or senior financial manager in a large or medium-size corporation has to make and the issues that need to be considered. By the end of the course, you will have a much better understanding of the important financial issues confronting the firm and the range of possible solutions. In addition, you will have developed your skills in financial planning and modelling and have a good feel for how financial managers make key financial decisions in practice. The course covers both traditional, or normative, business finance adopting a rigorous analytical framework as well as drawing on the new discipline of behavioural corporate finance, which uses the insights of cognitive psychologists to explain why financial managers behave as they do and why their decisions are frequently not optimal in conventional economic terms. Melding these two strands of teaching together provides very practical insights to help improve the quality of financial decisions made.
Course description	Not entered

Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites		Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations		Other requirements	None

Course Delivery Information
Not being delivered

Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to: On successfully completing this course: you will have an appreciation of some of the main strands of theory on which finance practice and its development depends. you will have an understanding of the key financial decisions the corporation has to make and the relevant issues that need to be considered. you will be able to appraise critically the criteria and systems adopted by firms for assessing and approving major capital investments. you will understand how firms make capital structure decisions and how they finance themselves. you will understand growth opportunities open to firms and problems associated with mergers, acquisitions and divestments. you will have a broad understanding of issues associated with financial distress and the prediction of corporate bankruptcy. you will understand some of the key considerations of good corporate governance, and their relevance in practice. you will be aware of some of the ethical issues confronting financial managers. you will be able to draw on the new discipline of behavioural corporate finance to help understand why financial managers may not behave "rationally" in practice. Course members will be expected to apply what they are covering on the course to current events in the financial news. They will be required to contribute to discussion of case material and some credit will be given for such a contribution.