Journal of
Financial Education

#1 - Learning From Exemplary Teachers

James A. Gentry and Robin W. Pratt

Exemplary teaching becomes more valuable when other teachers can learn to improve their teaching effectiveness from exemplars. Using TAIS inventory, we identified the characteristics of exemplary finance teachers (ETs) as spontaneous, confident, experimental, in-charge of their class, empathetic, and risks takers in expressing their thoughts. These characteristics, plus brief reflective insights from the ETs, provide suggestions to our colleagues on how to improve their teaching effectiveness and student learning.  Lowman (1996) concluded exemplary college teachers excelled in creating intellectual excitement and/or interpersonal rapport with students. Our study linked ET reports and TAIS inventory data to solidly support Lowman’s effective teaching model.

Pages 1-22

#2 - The Future Of Corporate Finance: A Survey Of Practitioner And Academic Opinions

Lawrence J. Gitman and Pieter A. Vandenberg

Financial practitioners and academics foresee great future changes in: (1) corporate finance, (2) the most important CFO skills, and (3) the types of transactions on which the future activities of CFOs will be focused. Results indicate that financial managers need to prepare for a changing set of responsibilities that are more strategic, more global, and more demanding in the use of technology. To be competitive, these managers need to strengthen their technology, communication, and leadership skills – all of which will be more important for preparing managers for activities that focus on shareholder value creation.

Page 23-42

#3 - Creativity And Student Interest In The Profession Of Finance

Kam C. Chan and Connie Shum

The discipline of finance has been perceived as structured and highly precision-oriented, which discourages creative individuals to pursue a career in finance. The objective of this study is to examine how students’ creativity interacts with their perception of the nature of the finance profession. The subjects are students in a principles of finance course. Based on the beginning- and the end-of-the-semester surveys, we find that the interactions of student creativity and their views on finance as a factual and structured profession are negatively related to the students’ perceived interest in finance as a profession. The findings are more profound for the end-of-the-semester survey. To mitigate these effects, professors may consider re-focusing a finance course on topics that are more innovative and more dynamic instead of emphasizing facts and structures. They can also use innovative methods in teaching to make finance more interesting and appealing to creative students.

Pages 43-64

#4 - Finding Firm Value 'Quickly' With An Analysis Of Debt

Tom Arnold and Jerry James

A firm value calculator (FVC) is introduced that is much faster and less tedious than its pro forma counter-part. The additional benefit of this FVC over what is available in the existing literature is a direct analysis of the effect of leverage. The debt analysis is captured within both the firm’s cash flow and the discount rate for the firm’s cash flow. The calculator can be implemented on a hand-held calculator or on an Excel spreadsheet making the analysis very amenable to the classroom.

Pages 65-82

#5 - Graphical Comparative Statics Analysis Of International Currency Markets

William L. Holahan and Charles Kroncke

The teaching of international trade and finance is becoming increasingly important as world trade expands and colleges and universities present global economics in their curricula. Yet a survey of introductory texts in both economics and finance reveals that international trade and finance is a topic that is relegated to a very late chapter and is presented without the same solid analytical framework used to explain other economic phenomena such as competition or monopoly. Students can gain the impression that this subject is unimportant, bearing little resemblance to what has gone before. To counter this view and to provide additional analytic content on this subject, we present a simple way to use supply and demand analysis to integrate the teaching of exchange rate determination with the exposition of the balance of current and capital accounts. We demonstrate that teachers and students wishing to perform comparative statics exercises can use the model.

Pages 83-89

#6 - Heart, Soul and Cash At Thermo Cardiosystmes

Jonathan B. Welch

Pages 90-112