Every seasoned investor knows that detailed financial projections for a new company are an act of imagination. Nevertheless, most business plans pour far too much ink on the numbers - and far too little on the information that really matters. Why? William Sahlman suggests that a great business plan is one that focuses on a series of questions. These questions relate to the four factors critical...

This paper investigates situations where a property of a ring can be tested on a set of “prime right ideals.” Generalizing theorems of Cohen and Kaplansky, we show that every right ideal of a ring is finitely generated (resp. principal) iff every “prime right ideal” is finitely generated (resp. principal), where the phrase “prime right ideal” can be interpreted in one of many different ways. We...

After the recent financial crisis, many types of government policies have been debated as possible remedies, but most of them are still controversial. This paper considers two: (A) limiting the growth of financial firms; (B) taxing financial transactions. It strengthens the arguments for both by means of the recently proposed rationality-allocation analysis, which broadens the view of financial...

This paper investigates the logical ties between investment, financing and dividends decisions, creating the coherence of these three strategic financial decisions of the firm. Basing on results of a questionnaire addressed to a number of financial managers of firms, a comparative survey between two investigations, one achieved at United States (by W.Pruitt and Y.Gitman on a sample of 114 firms...

A module $M$ is said to be coretractable if there exists a nonzero homomorphism of every nonzero factor of $M$ into $M$. We prove that all right (left) modules over a ring are coretractable if and only if the ring is Morita equivalent to a finite product of local right and left perfect rings.

Accounting regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are working towards global convergence of U.S. and international accounting standards by 2005. One of the areas that the regulators have identified as a necessary requirement for convergence is the treatment of financial instruments such as derivatives. In the U.S., the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) released Statement of Financia...