Twelve class sessions across four weeks for business undergraduates — most encountering finance for the first time. The universal toolkit (time value, inflation, risk, cash flow, valuation) anchored in French-market context: OAT yields, the CAC 40, LVMH, Pernod Ricard, Air Liquide. Built so a non-finance major leaves with the confidence to read a 10-K and value a public company.
This is a four-week introductory corporate finance class, taught in Paris as a study-abroad program. The students are business majors at the undergraduate level: some intend to major in finance, most don't, and for nearly all of them, this is the first finance course they've taken. The pedagogical goal is not to make them into analysts in four weeks — it's to build a sturdy mental model of how money compounds, how firms make capital decisions, and how a public company's value is estimated, so that subsequent finance coursework (or business-school applications, or first jobs) builds on solid foundations.
The class uses the Globefin online lessons as pre-class reading. Students arrive at each session having read the relevant lesson and worked through its quiz. Class time is for synthesis, calculation practice, and worked examples — primarily anchored in French companies and the French market. This is what makes the Paris class distinctive: students see the same universal framework applied through CAC 40 firms (LVMH, TotalEnergies, Air Liquide, Pernod Ricard), French sovereign-debt markets (OATs), and Paris-specific institutional context.
Business undergraduates, sophomore through senior year. No finance prerequisites. Comfort with high-school algebra is sufficient. Excel familiarity helps but is not required — toolkits are provided. Students should expect to spend roughly 4-6 hours per week on pre-class reading and lesson quizzes outside of class time.
By the end of the four weeks, students should be able to:
Compute time value of money — present value, future value, annuities, perpetuities, effective annual rate — and apply these to bond pricing, mortgage calculations, and personal financial decisions.
Distinguish nominal from real returns, understand how inflation erodes purchasing power, and adjust expected returns for inflation across multiple decades.
Apply capital-budgeting rules — NPV, IRR, payback — to evaluate corporate investments, and understand why NPV is the theoretically correct decision rule.
Read the three financial statements as a connected system, build a simple cash-flow forecast for a public company, and compute free cash flow to the firm.
Quantify risk-return tradeoffs using beta, the CAPM, and historical equity-market statistics. Understand the equity risk premium and what drives differences in beta across firms.
Estimate cost of capital — cost of equity via CAPM, after-tax cost of debt, and the WACC — for a public firm using market data.
Apply market-based valuation using P/E, EV/EBITDA, and EV/Sales multiples. Identify good comparables and reason about why multiples differ across firms and sectors.
Build a discounted cash flow valuation of a public company, defend assumptions, and run sensitivities — the synthesis exercise that ties together everything from the four weeks.
Several Paris-specific opportunities can deepen the in-class material beyond the classroom:
None of these is required. The class is fully deliverable in a classroom with the lessons and toolkits as the primary resources. Field trips are bonus material if the calendar allows.