Ivo Welch, September 2008
So far, we have not discovered any great errors. However, a list of errata will be kept here. Contributions will be appreciated.
After 5 years of work, my introductory corporate finance book, now called Corporate Finance: An Introduction, is being published in September 2008 by Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0321277996. Therefore, it is no longer accessible online. Please contact donna.battista@pearson.com to request an examination copy of the book. (Pearson, Prentice-Hall, and Addison-Wesley are really all the same company.)
I may or may not complete a derivative version of the book that focuses more on investments (asset pricing). Until then, you can download and read the relevant chapters here. Obviously, they are much more "raw" than the corporate finance chapters, but I think they use an excellent method to teach mean-variance optimization and the CAPM. These are the cornerstones of equity asset pricing.
If you want to understand the CAPM, even though they are still raw, these chapters are really great, IMHO. Much better than the formula way or hand-waving way usually found in investments books.
On the plus side, these chapters go much more into detail than the chapters in the corporate finance text. On the minus side, there is newer material (and sometimes overlapping material with better exposition) in the corporate finance test.
PS: Please realize that these chapters are free for use until December 2011, but they are copyrighted. You can download them, but you cannot redistribute them.
The book is now available for purchase (e.g., from Amazon with MyFinanceLab for $145). I really had no influence on the publisher's pricing decision, but if you wonder about why the prices of my own and all the other competitive textbooks are so high, then please read this. (PS: I learned that some alternative cheaper vendors are selling used books as new.)
The OVERCONFIDENCE Quiz.
The book has now been used at a number of schools for a number of years (e.g., Harvard, Yale, Brown, etc.), and not just by myself.
Interestingly, the most critical perspective that I have heard about my book is that some instructors felt that it may make them obsolete. This is not the case. Trust me—the material is difficult enough that even with the book, with notes tightly coupled to the book, with all homeworks tied to the book, and the exams tied closely to all of these, your median students will still not score an A [on an absolute scale] on your exams. Our finance material is more difficult for novices than we immersed instructors realize.
Prentice-Hall has invested a good deal of money into professional instructor slides, solutions manual, online test banks, etc. These resources are available for any instructor, even those who are merely thinking about assigning the book. Please email donna.battista for access.
In addition, my own classroom slides for a corporate finance introductory course (from 2008), organized by chapter, are here. The download version is at package-student.zip. Use the package-instructor.zip file to download the instructor notes, which has the answers filled in. (Email me for the password.) The notes are free for instructors to use and change, with really only one minor condition required: the reference to my corporate finance book must remain. Any other references to my person and copyright notices can be deleted. In fact, the whole point of still posting these slides is that they can become the starting slides for you (to change at your heart's desire) if you wish. (The notes are also available for student self-study, although instructor slides will not be made available to students.)
Instructors can feel free to email me if you need help from me for a specific reason. However, please realize that I no longer hold the copyright to book chapters, so only Donna Battista can grant permissions for individual chapter use at this point.
Eventually, this will become a site that contains all sorts of book related materials.