Seminar in Corporate Finance

A doctoral reading seminar that works backward from the canon of corporate finance, Modigliani-Miller, agency conflicts, information asymmetry, toward the open questions still worth writing a dissertation about. Most of the term is spent dissecting journal articles and recent working papers, with Tirole and a bit of Gibbons-style game theory as the shared vocabulary; the back half flips to student presentations where you defend a paper and develop your own proposal. The deliverables (a report, a paper proposal, a written final) are really one pipeline: the course exists to push you from reading the literature to producing a publishable research idea.