2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Review from MBA / GE student, 2005-07-22
This book is excellent reading. Foremost, it discusses clearly all of the major issues today in corporate finance - capital structure, "what investors want", incentives and performance measurement via Accounting versus Economic Value Added models, corporate architecture, etc. The author is extremely engaging, and I must admit, this is the first "text book" I've had that I wanted to keep reading. The author is sarcastic, opinionated, but objective all in one. An excellent purchase for a course or just if you're interested in understanding the way markets and corporate finance truly function.
3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
A good book of ARTICLES but too academic., 2004-04-27
Chew's New Corporate Finance is a quite decent book on journal articles on finance issues from a corporate standpoint. Other than your professor's own choice of favourite articles, Chew's may be the next best thing you can get. I won't give it a higher rating (4 or 5 star) because it lacks ground-breaking yet still easy-to-read articles from the less technical journals like Harvard Business Review, etc. Most of the articles are too academic coming from more or less the same journals. Moreover, the more technical ones have difficult formulas and number-crunching statistics which are more appropriate for MBA and MSc in Finance students, or those in researchers in "high-level derivative work".
I have the second edition (1999) of this book and used it sparingly for my MBA in Finance. And I've browsed through this new edition - what I found was there were not many changes made, only a few new articles have been added. Perhaps inclusion of some non-American articles would do justice to this book. Chew still keeps the classic ones though, which are always relevant. The roundtable discussion on EVA is interesting but Chew does not include criticisms on EVA shortfalls or problems.
On the whole, this text should be a reasonable introduction to high-level Finance and also a good supplementary reading for those doing MBA in Finance. But the editor's selection between technical and easy-to-read-but-important articles still leaves much to be desired.....
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
practical as well as academic, 2000-05-31
This book challenges you about what you really understand on finance. Before I read this I didn't like finance at all because it seemed too simplified. This book shows how the real world and people think. Especially, its chapter on risk is of a great help. Now I'm interested in some fields of finance such as internal corporate governance, real option, more refined and practical concepts than EVA, etc.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
A good reference for motivated MBAs and practitioners, 2000-05-15
As the title of the book clearly indicates, the text advances corporate finance beyond the theory presented in texts like Brealy and Myers. Thus, the text is geared towards a more sophisticated reading audience. In a collection of articles, academics and finance practitioners discuss the real world impact of capital budgeting, dividend/share repurchase policy, financial innovations (e.g. convertibles, commodity-linked bonds, derivatives, etc.), and bankruptcy on firms. Do not be scared off by the "academic" nature of this text. Unlike academic journals, the long-winded discussions on hypothesis testing and experimentation are abandoned (along with the high-level mathematics). The articles are very readable and any empirical evidence is presented in relatively friendly charts and graphs, which do a great job at providing the proper intuition. More importantly, the authors usually include real world anecdotal evidence to support the conclusions, as well.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent summary of various aspects of corporate finance, 1999-09-30
An excellent compilation of articles by top academicians in the field of corporate finance. The articles are ideal for a person who wants to get a good grasp of any area of Corporate Finance. Warning: This is definitely not for the beginners. It is ideal for practitioners who are interested in learning more.