Introduction to Corporate Finance

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• published: 25 Jan 2015
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There are important differences between real assets that are used to make everything we buy in our economy. We buy goods and services. Financial services and securities are another group of assets. These are not tangible. They have no physical form. CAPX is a measure of capital expenditure. The amount of capital expenditure in a quarter or a year represents the capital budget. This is the dollar value of the actual decision upper management makes to invest in tangible and intangible assets. A group of investment and financing decisions illustrate this. Investments include locomotives for trains and advertising for consumer goods. These investments are tangible and intangible uses of cash. A car factory is another tangible investment example. Examples of financing decisions include reinvestment of profits. Share buy-backs are another. An important consideration is what a corporation in essence is. This legal entity is owned by shareholders who seek bottom line results. Modigliani & Miller showed that the only way managers can increase firm value is to increase bottom line profits. They also showed that fiddling with the pay-out policy or capital structure should not affect firm value. A corporation can act like a person. It is a legal entity that is owned by its shareholders but it acts like a person that moves and thinks like its managers. This also means that a corporation can sue and even be sued in a court of law. But liability stops with the corporation. Shareholders have limited liability. And anybody can form a corporation. Here’s how you can form your own corporation. You first go out and raise capital from investors. You invest the cash in your firm. If the company is profitable money will be pumped out of operations. This cash-flow can be reinvested to expand operations. Or it can be returned to shareholders. Warren Buffett is very critical of the decisions executives make regarding cash. He is such a big investor that he acts as a financial manager mediating cash flow between the financial markets and the companies he funds. In the United States the goal of management is to maximize profits. In Germany managers take into account the needs of stakeholders. This is a much more expansive concept that includes workers, suppliers, and bankers. American CEOs typically become frustrated when dealing with a stakeholder management mentality. Even so profit maximization is ephemeral with regard to timing. Profits can be generated in ways that are damaging to the company. Buffett finds this fraudulent. Cutting dividends to free up cash is harmful if the firm earns less than the opportunity cost of capital. This alludes to a trade-off that exists between the hurdle rate cost of capital and the opportunity cost of capital. Investing in a project locks cash in place and obviates other opportunities. At the end of a successful quarter the CFO has to decide whether to reinvest in a positive NPV project or to pay a fat dividend to shareholders. The shareholders can then invest for themselves however they wish. A kink in the process is introduced if there are agency problems in management. These can arise from stupidity or sloppiness in the form of misfeasance. Executives can also be outright dishonest in the form of malfeasance. Empire building is a grey area where CEOs seek massive bonuses from mergers & acquisitions that do improve or destroy shareholder wealth. This can be exacerbated by differences in information where executives know more about dividends, financing, and outstanding issues. Managers want to maximize bonuses and pay while stockholders want to retain as much profit as possible. Conflict can occur between executive and operational management groups. Stockholders can end up at odds with bankers and other lenders. This conflict has existed since the Dutch East Indies. Modern mechanisms to clean up executives includes tighter scrutiny of the board of directors over the CEO; more independent board members; prohibiting the CEO to be chair of the board and stock options to align upper management incentives with shareholders. In some markets executives who shirk are thrown out by more competent ones. Dr. Scott Brown is a researcher in finance who is nationally recognized by the Certified Financial Analyst Institute (CFA). He is an associate professor of finance at the AACSB Accredited Graduate School of Business at the University of Puerto Rico and author of his bestselling Udemy course on Value Investing. Discover More in this Udemy Course on Value Investing Here: https://www.udemy.com/how-to-build-your-million-dollar-stock-portfolio-from-zero/ Also sign up for special offers at http://drscottbrown.com