My name is Heitor Almeida, I'm a professor of corporate finance at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I've been teaching corporate finance to MBAs, PhDs and
undergraduate students since 2001 and I also spend a lot of time
researching corporate finance topics that we will discuss in this course,
such as liquidity management, corporate investments and mergers and acquisitions.
I am originally from Brazil, so
this explains the song I always play in the beginning.
It also explains my accent.
I came to the US in 95 to work on my PhD in economics from the University of
Chicago, I managed to graduate in 5 years.
So, I've graduated from the University of Chicago in 2000.
My first job was at New York University.
I've spent seven years teaching and
doing research at NYU before I've moved to Champaign-Urbana in 2007.
Why did I get into corporate finance?
As with many paths in life, it was a little bit by accident and
I want to share the story with you.
This was about January of 1998 and at that point,
I had finished all my course work, I had finished my exams in the PhD.
And I was thinking about what am I going to do for my research?
What is my dissertation going to be about?
Remember, I was an economics PhD, so
I wasn't really studying finance at that point.
Finance is one of the topics we study in economics, but
there are many other topics.
Macroeconomics, labor economics and
I was really trying to think what I was going to do.
Corporate finance was not even crossing my mind at that point.
What happened is that I decided to take a course,
a course that really changed the course of my life.
It was a corporate finance course that was taught at
the Chicago Business School by a professor named Raghuram Rajan.
If you are from India, you probably heard his name.
He's currently the Central Bank governor of the Indian government, so
I'm sure you've heard his name or other people might have heard about him as well.
He was the chief economist of the IMF some years ago.
But in any case, that course was great.
I really enjoyed learning about corporate finance and
it got me thinking about how companies make financial decisions?
How companies make investment decisions?
I became fascinated with this topics.
And in particular, I became really interested in understanding why corporate
finance matters for the economy as a whole?
What is the link between corporate finance and macroeconomics and issues like that?
After that course, I never really looked back.
I started research corporate finance, I got my first job.
I started teaching corporate finance and I've been doing that ever since.
The morale of this story is that a single course can change your life.
So this is my office.
This is where I do my research and where I prepare my classes.
It's the typical office of a professor.
It's not very special, not particularly organized.
The real reason I brought you here is because the office of a professor is
like a visual resume, you can look up my resume on the web.
But it's nice to actually be here, so I can show you some things.
So here's where I have the prizes that I won for my research and for my teaching.
For example, I have this prize that I won in 2008 for
the best paper published in The Journal of Finance.
That year,
The Journal of Finance is considered to be the best journal in our profession.
So, I'm very proud of that one.
I have the medal that I won when I became a chair professor at University of
Illinois.
You can see that it's a very heavy medal, so people don't go around
wearing that medal, we just keep it here in our office for people to see.