Chapter/Session 5: Corporate Finance 101 @AswathDamodaranonValuation
Chapter/Session 5: Corporate Finance 101  @AswathDamodaranonValuation
Uploaded August 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Session Description: Corporate finance, as a body of knowledge, looks at the first financial principles involved in running a business, with decisions broken down into three groupings - investment (where you decide what assets/projects to invest in), financing (where you find the right mix of debt & equity, as well as the right type of debt and dividends (where you determine how much (if any) cash to return to your owners. In this session, I do a quick overview of these first principles, with a preliminary assessment of how they evolve with the corporate life cycle.
Slides: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/CLC/slides/Ch5.pdf
Exercise:
a.     Given your assessments of the five companies, which corporate finance decision (investment, financing, dividend) would you expect to have primacy?
b. Are there any corporate finance mismatches (companies not behaving the way they should, given their life cycle position) in your firms?
Chapter/Session 5: Corporate Finance 101Session 1: Class themes, structure and sequenceChapter/Session 4: Corporate Life Cycle - TransitionsSession 18: Intrinsic Value Closure and Pricing BeginningsData Update 9 for 2025: Dividends and Buybacks - Inertia and Me-tooism!Session 25: Acquisition Closure + Value EnhancementThe Indexing Question: Should SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic be in the S&P 500?Session 17: Optimizing the Debt Mix with Cost of Capital approachSession 10 (of 42): Temporal Price PatternsDeepSeek crashes the AI Party: Story break, change or shift?Dealing with Decline: Intel, Walgreens and Starbucks put to the test!Session 14 (Val MBAs): Story Closure and First DCFs
Aswath Damodaran |

Chapter/Session 5: Corporate Finance 101

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