Founding of an Enterprise
Module 2
Business Entities I
Prof. Dr. Carsten Jungmann
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course on Business Entities I will familiarize the participants with the legal and practical concepts of the financial and organizational issues relating to incorporated entities and partnerships. Basic economic concepts and models will be highlighted.
Participants will be able to distinguish between the different business entities (especially partnerships, stock corporations and companies with limited liability) available for the start-up and running of a business from a finance and from an organizational perspective. In this regard, practical advantages, disadvantages and the risks for shareholders/members/partners as well as for creditors dealing with the company are discussed.
The concept of limited liability in incorporated entities will be analyzed and compared to liability rules in partnerships. As partnerships (and hybrid forms of partnerships and companies/corporations) play an important role in practice for mid-sized businesses, the course has a clear emphasis on these entities.
With regard to stock corporations and companies with limited liability, special attention will be put on the central problems and current topics of corporate finance (capital maintenance rules, payout policies, capital measures, treatment of member loans, etc.).
In additional Business Entities Tutorials (participation optional), taught in small groups and focusing on the financial aspects of the course, students will gain an in-depth understanding of the (balance-sheet based) system of legal capital that works as a means of creditor protection in German and European corporate law. For this purpose, the interaction of accounting principles, corporate financing, pay-out considerations and creditor protection will be analyzed
Entrepreneurship
Prof. Dr. Peter Witt
The course investigates the process of starting a new company from the perspective of an entrepreneur. It provides participants with a theoretical background on the context of entrepreneurship and typical entrepreneurial behavior. It gives practical advice on how to start a company and discusses the preparation of business plans. We especially focus on three steps of the entrepreneurial journey: opportunity recognition, resource acquisition, and implementation. In addition, the course also looks at the challenges in later stages of the entrepreneurial process, e.g., managing fast growth and realizing a profitable exit.
Managerial Finance
Prof. Dr. Markus Rudolf, apl. Prof. Dr. Katrin Baedorf
Katrin and Markus are very happy to welcome you in the Course Managerial Finance as part of the Master of Law and Business program. The objective of this course is to make you familiar with some very relevant elements of financial theories that have important applications in your management life. We will focus on some basic concepts but also on more modern approaches. The focus will always be to understand the learnings we can derive from the different financial theories and how to apply the models. Thus, the course will have a very high level of practical orientation.
We will start in the course with a section on Value and Pricing. This part provides an introduction to the basic concepts of finance. It starts with basic tools for the valuation of asset classes and projects such as the concepts of Net Present Value (NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR). All the material is illustrated using an actual case.
The second part of the course applies the basic concepts to other assets, we call the section Advanced Financial Assets. This part covers derivative instruments, such as options and futures. It also gives a primer to the technology of blockchains. And the last part of this section deals with carbon regulation, carbon prices and carbon derivatives. This is a market which becomes increasingly important when it comes to CO2 neutralization of our economic processes.
In the third part of this course we will talk about Trading as the final implementation step of any asset management strategy. Here you will learn how a systematic trading process should be set up and what you can learn from using different trading systems. Examples will use real time market data and applications of trading strategies.
In the fourth part of this course we will focus on Behavioral Finance. This is a modern discipline in finance taking psychological effects in the decision-making process into account. We will introduce some very relevant models of Behavioral Finance and focus on their application in the asset management process.
End of Module 2 Case Study
Prof. Dr. Carsten Jungmann, Jernej Bergoc
In a case study of a start-up company in the shared mobility industry, students will be asked to apply their knowledge gained in the courses of Module 2 in order to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the start-up under review, as well as to give concrete recommendations on its future development.
