The goal of financial management in a for-profit business is to
make decisions that increase the value of the stock or, more
generally, increase the market value of the equity (‘shareholder
value’). We also learn that book values on an accounting balance
sheet can be very different from market values, and that a goal of
financial management is to maximize the market value of the firm’s
stock, not its book value, and that corporate finance has three
main areas of...