This Week In Finance

Using the Internet in Teaching Corporate Finance

Many of us use the Internet in teaching Corporate Finance - the existence of a (nearly) costless information source has a special appeal to Finance professors!

One of the challenges we face is just keeping up with the new web sites that crop up daily. A good recent source of WWW information is the June, 1997 issuse of Smart Money in the feature story, "The Ultimate Investors' Guide to the Internet." Below I have listed a few of the sites described in the article, along with some suggestions on how you might want to integrate them into your teaching.

1. Several topics and links related to corporate, treasury, and municipal bonds can be found at www.bonds-online.com. Of particular interest is the commentary on various credit market segments, as well as the weekly interest rate data. Try requiring students to obtain and interpret current market rates when covering the material on bond pricing and/or the material on cost of capital.

2. One of the best (and most entertaining) sources of economic information around is "Dr. Ed Yardeni's Economics Network" at www.yardeni.com. Dr. Yardeni is the Chief Economist at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell in New York. This is a glitzy, eyecatching site! Among the many features available are are weekly economic updates, topical reports by Dr. Yardeni, and daily capital market information. This site is one that will generate interest in the financial markets among your students!

3. A site which consists largely of finance-related links is the page at dailystocks.com. You will find links to stock quotes, earnings information, and even insider trading data here! Although it is done more commonly in Investments courses, I have, on occasion, required corpfin students to follow a particular industry or firm throughout the semester, and then had them report on various corporate events (and the resulting effects on firm value).

Finally, one of the best Finance-related web sites going is maintained at Ohio State University. For pages of links, set aside an hour or two for surfing and go to www.cob.ohio-state.edu/~fin/cern/quotes.htm.