Fundamentals of Corporate Finance was designed and developed for a first course in business or corporate finance, for both finance majors and non-majors alike. The text is nearly self-contained in terms of background or prerequisites, assuming some familiarity with basic algebra and accounting concepts, while still reviewing important accounting principles very early on. The organization of this text has been developed to give instructors the flexibility they need.

The best-selling text has three basic themes that are the central focus of the book:
1) An emphasis on intuition: the authors separate and explain the principles at work on a common sense, intuitive level before launching into any specifics.
2) A unified valuation approach: net present value (NPV) is treated as the basic concept underlying corporate finance.
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Stephen A. Ross was the Franco Modigliani Professor of Financial Economics at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of the most widely published authors in finance and economics. Professor Ross is recognized for his work in developing the arbitrage pricing theory, along with his substantial contributions to the discipline through his research in signaling, agency theory, option pricing, and the theory of the term structure of interest rates, among other topics. A past president of the American Finance Association, he also served as an associate editor of several academic and practitioner journals, and was a trustee of CalTech.