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Corporate Finance

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Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management

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Synonyms

Business corporate finance; Finance corporate

Definition

Zingales (2000) defines corporate finance as the study of the ways in which companies finance themselves. The adjective corporate serves to define the difference from other areas of financing, such as real estate financing or personal/individual financing. Hence, corporate finance encapsulates financing a business – not just an asset or an individual but rather the unique combination of assets and individuals that make up companies. The meaning of the verb “to finance” is “to raise or provide funds or capital for.” According to the aforementioned author, corporate finance covers three fundamental areas: capital structure, corporate governance, and evaluation.

In turn, Aswath (2001) incorporates into corporate finance: resource allocation (investment decisions), investment financing (decisions on capital structure), and whether the resources generated should be reinvested or distributed (dividends). In a more recent...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Viseu, Portugal

    António Pedro Soares Pinto & Pedro Manuel Nogueira Reis

Authors
  1. António Pedro Soares Pinto
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  2. Pedro Manuel Nogueira Reis
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Correspondence to António Pedro Soares Pinto .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. London Metropolitan University, Guildhall Faculty of Business and Law London Metropolitan University, London, UK

    Samuel Idowu

  2. Cologne Business School, Ingolstadt, Germany

    René Schmidpeter

  3. College of Business, Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Nicholas Capaldi

  4. International Training Centre of the IL, International Labor Organization, Turin, Italy

    Liangrong Zu

  5. Department of Economics, Society and Politics, University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Urbino, Italy

    Mara Del Baldo

  6. Instituto Politécnico da Guarda, Guarda, Portugal

    Rute Abreu

Section Editor information

  1. School of Law & Justice, University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia

    Benedict Sheehy

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Pinto, A.P.S., Reis, P.M.N. (2021). Corporate Finance. In: Idowu, S., Schmidpeter, R., Capaldi, N., Zu, L., Del Baldo, M., Abreu, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_943-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_943-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02006-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02006-4

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