Title: Inflation and Investments, with Focus on Inflation-linked Bonds.Investors face many types of risks when Allocating assets in a portfolio, e.g. volatility and inflation risk. Inflation risk will mainly affect investments in the long perspective. This thesis will examine those risks that an investor is commonly exposed to when Allocating assets in a portfolio and in particular inflation-linked risk and how to eliminate it. We examine the correlation between different assets and inflation to determine the assets? ability to hedge inflation risk.

Background: The basis for a price valuation of a company is dependent on both its assets net worth and earnings calculations. While the assets are an important part of the valuation of a company, it is important that the valuation is reliable and resource usage can be measured and allocated to each time period. Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to illustrate the difficulties when valuating and Allocating own produced fixed assets. Accomplishment: We have chosen a case study where the aims are to understand and explain the difficulties with valuating and Allocating own produced fixed assets. The research is based on nine personal interviews.

Adaptive Resource Allocating Vector Quantizer (ARAVQ) är en teknik för datareducering för mobila robotar. Tekniken har visats framgångsrik i enkla miljöer och det har spekulerats i att den kan fungera som ett generellt datautvinningsverktyg för tidsserier. I rapporten presenteras experiment där ARAVQ används som datareducerare på en artificiell respektive en fysiologisk datamängd inom en datautvinningskontext. Dessa datamängder skiljer sig från tidigare robotikmiljöer i och med att de beskriver objekt med diffusa eller överlappande gränser i indatarymden. Varje datamängd klassificeras efter datareduceringen med hjälp av artificiella neuronnät.

Abstract The main purpose off this essay is to understand what different ways women and men use to communicate and make themselves acknowledged by their co-workers.  This is done by interviews with people at an ordinary office and trough observations at the workplace. A qualitative method was entrenched and seven respondents, four women and three men, age 43-55 was interviewed. The theoretical frame contains theories from Goffman?s dramaturgic perspective such as roles, facade etc.  The theories concerning gender come from Hirdman?s different analyses on how the relations between men and women take form. The data collected shows that men and women use their body language, voice and accessories in different ways to make themselves acknowledge at the office.

This paper investigates the internal product costing system in one of the Swedish banks with the purpose to evaluate the quality of its product costs and possible implications on decision making. The study shows that the current system distorts product costs by, among other things, using relative allocation of costs and time and by Allocating all costs to individual units of products. We therefore propose an alternative product costing system, which mainly draws on ABC theory but is also adapted to the specific needs of service companies and of the Bank. This proposal is intended as a solution in this particular case and not to be generalized in other contexts. We hope however to add to the understanding of why more complex costing systems, such as the ones based on ABC theory are, according to previous studies, not widely used in practice.

Whether use of affirmative action can be justified is an ethical dilemma that hasbeen intensely debated. The question raises several conflict dimensions. Thepurpose of this thesis is to separate different arguments of the debate and classifywhich principles they are built upon. To accomplish this, an analytical instrumentis created where three different perspectives of equality, and deontology versusconsequentialism, are compared. A third conflict dimension, individual versusgroup ethical principles, is also considered.

Many media buyers annually spend money on advertising which will not be of benefit to their own brand; the fact that consumers confuse from which brand they have heard or seen commercials, comes as news to nobody. The phenomenon of media confusion has however earned much less attention. As a greater part of the total marketing budget is being spent on the media investments, on behalf of the actual advertising production, the more interesting it turns out to maximize the effects of the media expenses. The search for optimization is somewhat practised today by brand managers who are daringly adding a few more media channels to support their TV-campaigns. Buying ad space in TV is nevertheless much more expensive than the radio equivalent.

Turkey?s nearly fifty-year-old aspiration for admittance to the European Union took a crucial step forward with the signing of the Ankara agreement in 1996. The aim of this thesis is to examine the trade effects that evolve from the creation of a customs union. Our objective is to study how Turkey?s trade patterns adapted to the liberalized trade by examining the effects on resource allocation, specialization and welfare.

Since 2005 all companies listed on a regulated stock exchange within the European Union are required to present their financial reports in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and International Accounting Standards (IAS). The purposes of these standards are to accomplish international harmonization of accounting rules to make financial reports more comparable. However, recent research has shown that some firms tend to use goodwill strategically in a business combination by manipulating the acquired assets and consciously allocate the intangible assets to goodwill to reduce the depreciation in the income and decrease costs. This phenomenon may reduce the comparability between financial reports and thus has an opposite effect on the purpose of IFRS and IAS.The aim of this study is to show how the companies involved in this study allocate goodwill strategically. Furthermore, the introduction of the new standards has contributed to that goodwill now is a subject for impairment test, therefore we want to show whether this affected the comparability of the companies in this study.An empirical study was conducted, based on interviews with four Swedish managers.

Since 2005 all companies listed on a regulated stock exchange within the European Union are required to present their financial reports in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and International Accounting Standards (IAS). The purposes of these standards are to accomplish international harmonization of accounting rules to make financial reports more comparable. However, recent research has shown that some firms tend to use goodwill strategically in a business combination by manipulating the acquired assets and consciously allocate the intangible assets to goodwill to reduce the depreciation in the income and decrease costs. This phenomenon may reduce the comparability between financial reports and thus has an opposite effect on the purpose of IFRS and IAS.The aim of this study is to show how the companies involved in this study allocate goodwill strategically. Furthermore, the introduction of the new standards has contributed to that goodwill now is a subject for impairment test, therefore we want to show whether this affected the comparability of the companies in this study.An empirical study was conducted, based on interviews with four Swedish managers.

An important task for Region Skåne is to allocate resources to the health care districts. From 1999 to 2002 Region Skåne used needs-based resource allocation as a model for Allocating resources. In a needs-based resource allocation individuals with the same socioeconomic and demographic characteristics are assumed to have the same level of need and are therefore allocated the same amount of resources. During the period of needs-based resource allocation a matrix model was used as a method. In the matrix model individuals were divided into cells after each combination of the socioeconomic and demographic variables.

This paper aims to describe the geographical changes of Swedish international aid politics since 2007, which was the year the new aid reform of decreasing collaborating countries, came up. To decrease the number of aid receiving countries due to efficiency is not a new idea within Swedish aid politics, but Sweden received criticism from the (DAC) Development Assistance Committee, saying Sweden was active in too many countries, and the government established a policy to decrease the amount of countries given aid. Despite the government?s recent work, science has shown on a failed country focusing. This is followed up in the paper trough examination of statistics to measure the extent of the reduction.

Abstract Title: The Future of ABC at Sandvik Tooling ? Incorporating ABC with information systems in order to drive business development from a cost point of view. Authors: Jenny Andersson and Camilla Salomonsson. Supervisor: Charlotta Johnsson ? Department of Automatic Control, Lund University.

AbstractWe are facing a century of rapid change in climate, with significant challenges in managing the impact of changes in living conditions for plants and animals. We can already see the responses of species through changes in phenology and spatial distribution, which may change ecosystem structure and function, with subsequent effect on ecosystem services and biological diversity. In Sweden, between 2005 and 2010, the red-listed species has increased by 13 % and similar trends can be seen across the world, making it difficult to attain national and international environmental objectives of preserving biodiversity. One way to reduce the loss of biodiversity is to protect nature from exploitation by Allocating valuable areas as nature reserves, but climate change affects protected areas just as much as other landscapes and therefore requires elaborate systems of protection to facilitate species' survival. The paper has examined  how the decisions and management plans for nature reserves in Sweden have been followed-up and whether they are climate adapted or not by examining 30 nature reserves, classified as newly formed (2012), recently revised (2009-2011) and older (1977-2007) reserves, and assessed what is in the decisions and management plans for follow-up, revision, long-term goals and documentation.