The good people at the Open Syllabus Project looked at over a million syllabi and extracted citations and other metadata from them, including textbooks and journal articles. The top general book in finance is "A Random Walk Down Wall Street", the top textbook is "Corporate Finance" by Ross and the most assigned journal article is … Continue reading Analyzing a million syllabi

The Wall Street Journal published an article called "Why Banks at Wal-Mart Are Among America's Top Fee Collectors" on May 11, 2014. The article begins as follows: "On a rainy morning in April, Anna Proctor entered a Wal-Mart Supercenter near some of this city's poorest areas to get $300 for urgent car repairs—money she didn't … Continue reading Exercise: Bank overdraft fee

Harvard Business Publishing offers the online simulation "Capital Budgeting": "In this single-player simulation, students act as members of the Capital Committee of New Heritage Doll Company, tasked with selecting and allocating capital across the company's three divisions. Students evaluate a diverse set of competing investment proposals and make decisions regarding 27 separate proposals over a five-year … Continue reading Using simulations to teach capital budgeting

  We are always working hard to improve the number and quality of our problems. All problems are targeted at particular textbooks and use the same terminology and solution approach as the book. We recently added new problems for Ross, Westerfield & Jordan's books "Fundamentals of Corporate Finance" (standard edition) and "Essentials of Corporate Finance". In … Continue reading New problems for Ross, Westerfield and Jordan

How rising text book prices mirror rising drug costs (NBC video, 3:15) The price of textbooks has risen fifteenfold since 1970, three times the rate of inflation (see chart). Like doctors prescribing drugs, professors assigning textbooks do not pay for the products themselves, so they do not always take price into account. Publishers "have been able to keep … Continue reading Breaking the textbook drug habit

Title: And it's gone URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DT7bX-B1Mg Subject: investing, banks, compound interest Length: 1:40 (1 minute, 40 seconds)

Learning about annuities can be dry when students cannot relate to the concept. However, since many students have student loans, this is an ideal context to study annuities and interest rates. I therefore present my students with the following exercise, to be solved in class while working in pairs. Year in college Amount borrowed Interest rate 1 $3,500 … Continue reading Exercise: Federal student loan