FINANCIAL ANALYSIS AND PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

Description

The Course intends first to develop students’ skills in understanding, analyzing, and interpreting financial statements. Conceptually, the course emphasizes that producers and users of financial statements have different objectives and informational needs. At the same time, the course is applied in that it teaches students how to analyze actual financial statements data to make informed business decisions and assessments. The course assumes a good command of basic financial accounting topics, but the first sessions will be devote to create a common language on financial reports and financial measures (accounting based, market based, ESG based). Second this course is designed to broaden and deepen students’ conceptual and technical understanding of accounting as it is used for management purposes. The emphasis in the course is on financial controls, which provides the dominant form of control in the vast majority of decentralized organizations. This module provides support in business decisions, evaluation of organizational performance, or in evaluation of others (and/or be evaluated) using financial and non-financial information The course is made up by two parts. Macro content items follow. Part 1: - Undrstanding financial statements - Fundamental analysis - Growth strategy and financial tensions: the logic behind target setting - Market based measures, ESG and integrated reporting Part 2: - Management and control - Financial responsibility - Incentive systems - Remedy to the miopia problem - Uncontrollable factors Exchange/course-load context: The official incoming exchange catalogue states that 30xxx codes refer to undergraduate courses, 20xxx and 21xxx codes refer to graduate courses, and 50xxx codes refer to the Integrated Master of Arts in Law. Undergraduate exchange students are allowed to select undergraduate-level courses only; graduate students can choose both undergraduate and graduate level courses. Bocconi credits are ECTS-equivalent. Each Bocconi credit corresponds to 25 hours of workload, including 8 lecture hours.