Why Did I Want to Share My Writings With You?

In my academic work and in advisory processes I prepared, over the years, a large number of short studies and briefing notes in order to understand the problems I encountered more clearly, to deepen the knowledge I needed and to keep what I already knew up to date. These notes, which I produced largely for my own needs and which now number in the hundreds, seemed to me worth placing, after review and updating and, where useful, with the help of artificial-intelligence tools, at the disposal of a wider readership.

The principal aim of this undertaking is to share theoretical knowledge of corporate finance in as clear, intelligible and usable a form as possible, by relating it to the problems and decision processes encountered in practice. I aim in particular to build a body of applied knowledge that financial managers, business owners, academics, students and others with an interest in the subject can draw on in their day-to-day decisions.

I would like the pieces collected here to be seen not as finished and unchanging texts, but as parts of a process of knowledge-sharing that remains open to development over time. I believe that criticism, corrections and suggestions from readers will raise these studies to a more rigorous and more useful level.

I hope that this effort will, to some degree, contribute to a closer relationship between knowledge in the field of corporate finance and its application.