Current Courses

30120 - Accounting, Economic, and Regulatory Issues in Complex Deals

This course focuses on the use of financial accounting to express the economic realities of complex organizations and the deal structures and transactions that shape the design of these organizations. To this end, we will examine the accounting, regulatory, and institutional aspects of a variety of different transaction types. We will pay particular attention to how the global regulatory and institutional environment affects the structure of deals and transactions across borders.

The course will benefit any student who desires to increase their ability to understand and profitably exploit financial information, including (but not limited to), entrepreneurs, consultants, bankers, investors, analysts, corporate managers, marketers, strategists and deal-makers of all types. The hope is that this class will increase your sophistication as a user of financial information by enhancing your ability to penetrate the complexity of intricate organizational architectures and gain deeper insight into an organization’s business model, strategy and performance.

We will employ several different types of valuation models/approaches to investigate the impact and feasibility of different deal structures, accounting choices, operating assumptions, and financing decisions. We will also discuss how incentives shape reporting decisions and the existence of earnings management and fraud in an acquisition- and IPO-specific context. The course will draw on basic valuation concepts and financial statement analysis skills taught in your other classes that we will advance in various ways. First, we will integrate institutional and process-related details into our study of corporate transactions. Second, we will extend accounting, taxation and regulatory knowledge to equip you for deal-specific analysis. Third, we will use case-studies, real world examples, and models of these transactions (e.g, M&A, LBO, reverse mergers, and restructuring).