The Making of Modern Corporate Finance

Why did the stagflation of the 1970sthe improbable combination of high unemployment and runaway inflationprove so painful and protracted? What explains the U.S. stock markets remarkable forty-year run of 12 percent average annual returns since then? Why is Japan still mired in a decades-long recessionand the Chinese economy in a tailspin? And what accounts for the resilience of U.S. stock and labor markets in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the face of the Feds record interest rate hikes? Donald H. Chew, Jr., argues that answers to these questions lie in the principles and methods of modern corporate finance. Ideas formulated and tested by finance scholarsnotably, an efficient stock market in which prices reflect the long-run values of public companies and a market for corporate control that exerts continuous pressure on managementinformed and spurred the investor-driven capitalism that has created the worlds most productive and valuable companies. Drawing on his career-long relationships with leading academics and practitioners, Chew profiles key figures in the development of modern corporate finance while emphasizing their counterintuitive lessons for shareholders, companies, and countries. Corporate efficiency and value creation, he contends, are the fundamental source of the social wealth essential to addressing challenges such as poverty and climate change. Lively and provocative, this book makes corporate finance approachableand even admirablefor readers interested in how the success and failure of companies affect their lives.