Robert Shiller opens this Yale Financial Markets lecture with his own experience founding a corporation, then turns to World Bank data on the scale of global corporate stock markets. He breaks down how a corporation is structured, covering shareholders, the board of directors, and the chief operating officer, and compares for-profit and nonprofit forms. The lecture works through equity financing in detail: market capitalization, dividends, share repurchases, dilution, and the distinction between common and preferred shares. Shiller directly challenges the claim that issuing shares no longer matters much for raising capital in modern finance. He closes by walking through the actual balance sheets of Xerox and Microsoft, using them to ground the abstract financing concepts in real corporate numbers. Part of his 2011 ECON 252 course.