The Business Finance Guide
A significant part of the coursework teaches students to understand risk and uncertainty, both at an intuitive level and at a technical level. More important, students learn to construct models of financial decisions—e.g., an investor’s portfolio choice problem, the issuance of securities by corporations, and the structure of financial investments by banks. An area of business finance that has grown steadily in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is the practice of extending small loans to poor entrepreneurs who live in developing countries. The practice is known as microlending, and the loan is often called microcredit. The purpose of microlending is to assist individuals in creating income for themselves and therefore to improve their living standards. Microcredit is generally issued for a short time period , and the terms mandate that it be paid back on a weekly basis. Interest rates on the loans generally are high (in some places percent) because costs of running...