Integrated Design of a Mergers and Acquisitions Finance Course Using a Specialized Trading Lab: A Collaboration Between Management Faculty and the Library

Abstract

This article describes a collaboration between the Department of Management and the Li Koon Chun Finance Learning Centre in the Hazel McCallion Academic Learning Centre at the University of Toronto Mississauga. It describes the planning and delivery of a new 4th-year course on Mergers and Acquisitions for the 2011 winter term, along with practical tips on how to build successful collaborations between different organizational units within a university. The strong positive student feedback indicates that this faculty–library collaboration was a success. This experience and partnership can be modeled at many other academic institu- tions.

KEYWORDS:

• library instruction
• partnership
• collaboration
• librarian–faculty collaboration

Notes

Liu and Holowczak focused on the Reuters 3000 Xtra, which subsequently became the Thomson Reuters 3000 Xtra. The 3000 Xtra financial information system is available in the LKC FLC, and was used as one of the resources in the M&A course discussed in this article.

There are many other resources that could have been used to support the course; however, the choice of databases was restricted to what was then available in the LKC FLC, through the University's library, or freely available on the Internet.

BCE's acquisition of CTV.

Bay Street is the Canadian equivalent to Wall Street in the United States.

For instance, the training emphasized an accretion/dilution model for analyzing M&A transactions, which had only been briefly referred to during the course. In the next offering of this course, that model will be given a more central role, as it affects how deals are structured.