Background and problem: The importance of banks was clearly shown during the last financial crises, when the crises that started in the banking sector spread to the rest of the world. This is one of the reasons that this thesis is focused on banks in particular, one other reason is that a lot of previous studies has chosen to exclude banks because of the fact that their balance sheet differ from non-financial companies. This thesis is a beginning in filling in the gap that exists in the knowledge of banks capital structure. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to prove that it is possible to explain the capital structure in banks and that differences in the capital structure of the banks in Great Britain, Sweden and the United states of America exists. Method: The fact that our study is partly a replication of two earlier studies made a deductive approach most appropriate.

This paper analyzes the auditor choices for a sample of 300 predominantly small Swedish firms, all located in Umeå. Our hypothesis was based on the complexity of a firm, the need of external financing, leverage, and the need of extra consultance from the auditfirm. Our definition of auditor quality is based on prior studies, and is frequently used by authors in this area. The assumption is based on that the auditor quality increases with the size of the auditfirm and the degree of the auditor. The auditor quality is therefor depending on the choice between an auditor from the group ?Big 5? or not, and the choice of an auditor with an higher degree.

Sustainability reports are drawn up for the company's stakeholders and declare the company?s corporate social responsibility. Consumers are one of the companies' most important stakeholders for food companies. This study is aimed to describe how consumers perceive sustainability reporting in the food industry and if the application level of the GRI framework has an impact on how consumers perceive sustainability reports. Consumer perception is described in the GRI principles and the basis is the ICA and Coop's sustainability reports, which are two of Sweden's largest food company.

I en värld där individer möts av mängder av ekonomiska begrepp och ekonomisk information dagligen har forskning visat att människor har svårt att engagera sig och ha den förståelse som krävs för att hantera sin egen privatekonomi. Begreppet ?Financial Literacy? nämns ofta som en förklaring till människors olika kunskapsnivå och förståelse. I människors yrkesmässiga roll tas denna förmåga ofta för given vara uppfylld. Denna uppsats har undersökt ekonomiska kunskaper och ekonomisk förståelse hos enskilda näringsidkare, en företagsform där privatekonomin och näringsverksamhetens ekonomi är nära sammankopplade.

The purpose of this essay is to study the two cases ?The hijacking of a bus in Årdal? & ?The double murder in Ljungsbro? from media ethics aspects.  The aim for this study is to clear up if the the Swedish newspapers have reported according to the mediaethic rules and to see if there is any differences between the newspapers reporting. The following theories has been used to reach the objective: the journalism task, news values, the liberty of press and speach, media ethical rules and discursive discrimination. The study has used a critical discourse method formed by Teun a. van Dijk to analyse the material, mainly through macro- and microstructures.

The purpose of this essay is to study the two cases ?The hijacking of a bus in Årdal? & ?The double murder in Ljungsbro? from media ethics aspects.  The aim for this study is to clear up if the the Swedish newspapers have reported according to the mediaethic rules and to see if there is any differences between the newspapers reporting. The following theories has been used to reach the objective: the journalism task, news values, the liberty of press and speach, media ethical rules and discursive discrimination. The study has used a critical discourse method formed by Teun a. van Dijk to analyse the material, mainly through macro- and microstructures.

Title: Culture?s Affect on the Determinants of Customer Satisfaction in Retailing: The Case of a European Retailer in the U.S. and China Date of the Seminar: 29th of May 2007 Course: BUS 809 Master thesis in International Marketing Authors: Lisa Bustamante Chesley Norman Charlotte Valind Advisors: Johan Anselmsson Cecilia Cassinger Keywords: International Retailing, Determinants of Customer Satisfaction, Culture, United States, China Thesis purpose: Our study aims to identify the determinants of customer satisfaction of two national cultures in a global retail setting, in order to clarify what role culture has, if any, in customers? satisfaction with an international retailer. Further, this will uncover if a Western perspective of determinants of satisfaction is a universal means of capturing what satisfies customers across cultures in a retail setting.

We have seen a revolution in the area of communication on a worldwide scale. We begin talking about terms as globalisation, integration and deregulation of the financial market. Companies have been tax planning for decades, the questions is if Internet has made an increase of companies than uses tax planning and which roll Internet plays. It is hard to really pinpoint all the effects of the Internet because of the relatively new area of research. This thesis will take various factors under study such as globalisation, development of the offshore industry and the fight against harmful taxation by the OECD and other organisations in order to describe the effects of Internet.

Early Swedish films from the 1910?s and 1920?s are not only an important part of Sweden?s cultural heritage, but also an important part of the international film heritage. This period is often refereed to as the golden age of Swedish film history. Despite this fact, the possibility to watch Swedish films from this period is very small and the main purpose of this thesis is to examine why the availability of these films has such low priority in the Swedish film policy and at the Swedish Film Institute. With the use of policy analysis, I study governmental policies and policies from the Swedish Film Institute for early Swedish films and seek to identify the policy problem and its different parts.

Even if the main purpose is to decide if the companies profitability and financial position is a determining factor for its growth, the purpose is to determine if there are any differences between big and small companies in there economical positions then they grow, in the selected industry. This thesis is mainly a quantitative study. The selected industry for the study is extraction of turf. The financial measurement that most clearly differ the growing companies from the not growing companies or the companies that didn?t change there amount of employees was the returns of the companies own capital.

This study is intended to study how the social worker in financial assistance relates to the social workers exercise of its authority, regarding the Social Services Act and the Administrative Procedures Act. In concerning how the social worker treats and handles the cases of their clients, but also what significancethe organization's policies and goals have on the social worker?s role and the formation of their professional identity. To answer these questions the study chose a qualitative approach. Because the purpose of this study is to investigate the social worker?s personal beliefs about their way of conducting social work.

Background: Sweden and the rest of the world went through the biggest financial crisis at the end of 2008 since the 1930s. The major Swedish banks have goodwill related to their acquisitions inside and outside Scandinavia. Swedbank, SEB and Nordea has acquired in the Baltic countries and Russia, however Handelsbanken has established itself in Great Britain. The crisis in the Baltic countries led that real wages fell, unemployment rose, real estate prices collapsed and the number of borrowers who had trouble repaying their loans increased rapidly. All this led to the problem of impairment of goodwill in the Swedish banks that had expanded rapidly in the Baltic countries.Aim: The aim of this study is to investigate the application of IFRS 3 in Swedish banks before, during and after the financial crisis, and to investigate the low-downs in the four majorSwedish banks in 2006-2010.Completion: The study is primarily based on the case studies by the examination of the annual reports from all banks as well as evaluation of the interviews.The authors have chosen to makea strategic choice of a small number of cases through the concentration on the impairment of goodwill in the bank sector of Sweden.Results: The result of this study is that there are problems for banks in implementation of IFRS 3 in practice because of insufficient information in the banks' financial statements.Generous estimates used in the calculation of impairment testing.

Utvecklingen inom näringslivet tycks gå mot ett mer ansvarsfullt företagande, men hur kan man veta vilket arbete som egentligen sker och vilka effekter detta får? De tre viktigaste identifierade dimensionerna av ansvarfullt företagande för en hållbar utveckling är ekonomi, miljö och etik (sociala aspekter). Ett uppmärksammat ramverk i sammanhanget är Global Reporting Initiatives riktlinjer och företagen såväl som regeringen har identifierat behovet av ett mer aktivt arbete med hållbar utveckling och redovisningen av detta. Syftet med denna uppsats är att med ett redovisningsperspektiv undersöka orsaker till och metoder för hållbarhetsredovisning samt identifiera och påvisa möjlig utveckling för företagens redovisning av hållbar utveckling. Vår analys bygger på en kvalitativ undersökning, eftersom vi är intresserade av hållbarhetsredovisning i ett bredare perspektiv genom att belysa så många aspekter som möjligt hos de undersökta bolagen. Undersökningen har visat att det inte finns någon heltäckande hållbarhetsredovisning hos de undersökta bolagen, men att det trots detta finns inslag av hållbarhetsredovisning och en potential och vilja för att kunna utveckla och förbättra arbetet med och redovisningen av hållbar utveckling..

This paper describes Tempus Custode, a smartphone application with which the user may register working hours and travel time during the work day. The application communicates with a database via a server. The data stored in the database may be manipulated using an administrator tool, mainly for the composition of time reports. In this way, the user?s task of time reporting his day is greatly simplified.The application is able to automatically discriminate between work time and travel time, as it continuously fetches positioning data from the smartphone GPS receiver.

The purpose of this essay is to study the two cases ?The hijacking of a bus in Årdal? & ?The double murder in Ljungsbro? from media ethics aspects.  The aim for this study is to clear up if the the Swedish newspapers have reported according to the mediaethic rules and to see if there is any differences between the newspapers reporting. The following theories has been used to reach the objective: the journalism task, news values, the liberty of press and speach, media ethical rules and discursive discrimination. The study has used a critical discourse method formed by Teun a. van Dijk to analyse the material, mainly through macro- and microstructures.