619 - Information and Global Capital Markets

This class examines how the managers of firms from different jurisdictions communicate with their constituencies in global capital markets, and how investors in global securities analyze their investment opportunities. The class begins with a consideration of the measurement problems a firm faces when it operates in different economic, political, and currency regions. Some of these issues are foreign currency gains and losses, hedging instruments, transfer pricing, international taxation, and multinational performance evaluation. The second half of the course considers how firms communicate with their external constituencies in transnational settings.

The goals of the course are:  to familiarize students with some of the measurement and disclosure issues, terminologies and skills pertinent to transnational firms; to introduce students to resources and tools available for evaluating foreign and domestic multinational financial statements and disclosures, and for answering measurement questions encountered by multinational managers and investors; to teach students how to use (and how not to use) the information from foreign financial statements to make investment and acquisition decisions; to integrate topical examples from the financial press and multinational firms’ financial statements with current academic research to provide both theoretical structure and positive application of multinational disclosure concepts; to demonstrate the links between international measurement issues and global disclosure choices and other areas of international business, such as macroeconomics, international finance, global marketing strategies, as well as non-business areas such as culture, communications, law, and political science.