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

Note: The approach discussed in this blog post has been superseded by a new approach discussed in the more recent blog post "Teaching financial concepts (v1.1)." With enough explanations, in-class examples and practice on the homework, students eventually learn how to solve numerical finance problems. However, they seem to have a much harder time understanding financial concepts. I … Continue reading Teaching financial concepts with in-class essays

New features We have released a number of new features for Accepi that make your life as a finance professor easier: Student view for professors (see what your students see) Separate first and last name (sorting by last name makes it easier to match scores to students in your LMS) Assign the same problem to … Continue reading Features to make your life easier

Here are the best methods I've tried to engage my students. You don't have to use all methods in one course, but can pick and choose what works for you. Flip the classroom As I described in my post Flipping the finance classroom, assigning readings for students to do at home and using class time to apply and practice … Continue reading 8 ways to more engaged students in your finance classroom

Based on a national sample of 2,530 undergraduate finance courses that were offered in the U.S. in spring 2015, we have compiled a list of the most popular finance textbooks in each subject area. Below are those with market shares greater than 5%. Corporate Finance / Financial Management 27.6%: Ross & Westerfield: (Essentials of/Fundamentals of) Corporate Finance 17.6%: Brigham … Continue reading The most popular finance textbooks (updated)

One way to engage students is to have them work on problems that they can relate to. An obvious example is to let them work out their course grade, which is often a weighted average of their scores on various components. An example is listed below: Course requirement Weight Max pts. Points News presentation 5% … Continue reading Practicing Excel by having students calculate their grade