Hedge funds have the past few years become an increasingly popular investment alternative and in the last decade hedge fund assets managed have quadrupled to USD 2000 billion, a growth rate of around 25-30% per year. One explanation for this substantial increase is that hedge funds' minimum limits on capital invested has declined, which have made ??them available to retail investors. The recent turmoil in financial markets has also contributed to investors finding their way to hedge funds, whose goal is to generate stable returns regardless of how the market develops.Using Sharpe?s, Treynor?s and Jensen's performance measures, I have investigated whether hedge funds manage to generate higher risk-adjusted returns than traditional managed funds.

This is a thesis in Personal- och Arbetslivsprogrammet at Dalarna University with thepurpose of evaluating an education initiative in Borlänge kommun. The educationCoaching Leadership is an initiative for the managers in the organization to exercisegood leadership and the education also serves as an incentive for managers. Eightbusiness managers and one from the HR staff have completed the training. Out of thetotal 9 participants in the training, six of them took part in this evaluation. Based on thethesis aim and questions we wanted to explore participants' attitudes to the education,and what skills and abilities they have acquired on the basis of educational goals andcontent.

This is an empiric, qualitative, case study of cooperation between two public organizations in Ystad, Sweden (Försäkringskassan and Ystad kommun). The aim of the study is to illuminate why they cooperate and what happen with the idea to cooperate and the organizations when they do. The theoretical tools used are influenced by institutional theory. A translationmodel is used to illustrate what the local actors do with the idea when a decision is made to adopt it and how it affects the actors. The study suggests that the cooperation in Ystad called One Stop Shop is partly done because it's a popular way of organizing public organizations in Sweden and partly because försäkringskassan, aim to upgrade their organization identity.

My purpose with this paper related to my questions was to find out how professionals preeschool teachers working on multilingualism. I also wanted to get answers on how pedagogues in the preeschool may promote multilingual children´s language development, the factors that promote multilingual children´s language development and the role parents have in the language development of multilingual children. I chose to do my study in the form of interviews with professional preeschool teachers and interviewees described including the need for more knowledge of pedagogues around multilingualism. My result based on theoretichal background and the study is that pedagogues should let the children´s all languages esemble together. A factor influencing the multilingual children´s language development is ambient attitudes to multilingualism.

This essay is a study of the motives and driving forces affecting how a food producer looks at, and incorporates, an environmental-labeling and its impact on their organization and strategy. Driving forces and motivations is an important part of a business strategy and impacts its content and its expression. Sustainability can be part of the overall company strategy but could also define the entire company. This study has shown that the main motive for working with eco-labelling is a genuine interest in issues concerning sustainability. This creates an opportunity for the company to communicate their environmental policies to their customers. For a company that works proactive and innovative with sustainability and climate issues, the new climate framework does not mean any major organizational or strategic changes.When the framework is incorporated in the organization the farms need to be analyzed with a climate impact perspective. This essay shows that this process, together with tools developed to handle the framework, make change in the way dairy farmers think and how they relate to their daily work..

The purpose of this essay is to investigate which components previous scientific studies suggest that an efficient treatment for adolescents with behavioural problems should contain. For this purpose, an extensive review of scientific research conducted in Scandinavia has been read and will be presented in this essay. This essay also present an introduction to residential care in Sweden as well as to an alternative form of treatment for adolescents with behavioural problems called Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC). The result of this essay suggest that treatment of adolescents with behavioural problems should be based on the emphasis of risk/resilience factors of the youth and that the treatment should be adapted to the youth?s individual personality and way of learning.

During the spring semester of 2009 I have participated in what was to become the project The Allotment Plot; a collaboration between the Swedish University of Agriculture and the Wanås Foundation. As one of six students in landscape architecture I have experienced a group based learning process with the point of departure in the designing of an organic and experimental kitchen garden at Wanås, a sculpture park for contemporary art. The project came out as neither us nor any other of the people engaged could have guessed. What was meant to be a garden turned out to become an entire cultivation movement. As students, we have gained a lot of experience through praxis; experience that will be valuable for our future profession. The project has also opened up the possibility to question and reflect upon what our profession and education could or should be about. This thesis focuses on the role of communication and the production of communicative tools in design processes and landscape architectural practice. It discusses how communication may be used in an exploratory and ?un-securing? way, and how this may dislocate the professional role, especially in situations where the design action, as in the case of this study, demands a high degree of transdisciplinarity and collaboration. .

As today, companies are facing an increasing competition; markets are expanding while customers are getting more informed and fastidious toward companies and their products. For this reason it is crucial for enterprises to create loyal customers, or at best hyper loyal customers. With today's prerequisite this creation is difficult and it is therefore of highly interest to examine possible and alternative ways for enterprises to attain this type of hyper loyal customer. In this thesis we have examine hyper loyal football supporters with the aim to identify mechanisms that create and characterize this type of loyalty. By means of a survey and a focus group we were able to identify six loyalty mechanisms; the ability to influence, vicarious achievement, self-esteem, group affiliation, family and social relations.

The aim of the study was to through empirical studies interpret the relation between three partially investigated house foundations, on an abandoned farm in Langhammars on northern Fårö. This relation focused upon two main questions; the time of use and the spatial distribution of the archaeological finds.Trough comparative analysis two of these houses can establish to have been contemporary, the third one is too roughly examined. A discussion about the hypothec idea of two or three contemporary farms was made with a negative result.In house 1 smaller processing of tools of flint has taken place near the fireplace in the larger room. A concentration of pottery was also visible near the fireplace, likely to be connected to cooking and eating. The smallest room in the northeast part of the house could have functioned as a storeroom and/or held workshop activities.The archaeological finds and the distribution of it, strongly indicates that house 1 mostlikely consisted of a dwelling house and house 2 functioned as a workshop; linked to activities with handicrafts.

Försäkringskassan har på sista tiden varit ett föremål för diskussioner i media. En stark negativ bild av myndighetens handläggare tenderar att framkomma ur mediala sammanhang. Samtidigt finns det en medvetenhet hos handläggarna kring vikten av att arbeta med hänsyn till individen. Studiens syfte är att studera de redskap och arbetssätt som används av Försäkringskassans handläggare i arbetslivsinriktad rehabilitering utifrån ett empowermentperspektiv. Vi gjorde en kvalitativ studie som bygger på intervjuer med nio handläggare på Försäkringskassan som arbetar med sjukpenningsärende på enheten fördjupad utredning.

This thesis deals with the legislative problem of thin and thick capitalization of subsidiary companies situated abroad. This kind of companies are often used for tax planning purposes, as means for transferring company profit from a high tax state to a low tax state. Today, the legislative flora around the world mainly focuses on the question"how low/high can the capitalization level of the company be, before thin/thick capitalization can be considered to be at hand?". Instead, this thesis raises the question"how far from the optimal capitalization rate is a probable capitalization level for a company, and can this be an alternative approach to legislation?".

Since 1983 the people of Sri Lanka has endured an ongoing Civil war, however the intencity has varied over the years. The aim of this theses is to examine what influence the asymmetric relationship between the Sri Lankan goverment and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has on the process of negotiating a solution to the civil war. I am also examining whether the asymmetical relationship has changed over time and if these changes have had any effect on the process.To analyze the asymmetries I divide them into material and non-material. I measure the material asymmetries in economic and military resourses, and to measure the non-material I use indicators such as commitment, alternative, controll and legitimacy.The results show that the asymmetrical relations between the parties in Sri Lanka have changed since the 1990s. Factors like 9/11 and the recurrent suicide bombings by the LTTE has had a great influence on the singalese-tamil relationsship.

Sustainability and the traffics impact on the environment have become increasingly central within spatial planning. For many years, planning has been focusing on building new roads - this has resulted in increased use of automobiles, which many believe is unsustainable in the longer term. Therefore, authorities at national, regional and local level want to increase the use of alternative transport modes ? such as walking, cycling and traveling by bus.The thesis intends to study if the Municipality of Umeå?s policies for sustainable development have led to an increased use of public transportation. The use of public transport in Umeå is also compared with developments at national level, in order to see if there are differences in the level and trend.

The purpose of this thesis is to expose the political myth in the West about the ageing population seen as a threat against the welfare society. To do so I have described what a political myth is, and showed how it is presented in the most influential newspapers and organisations in the West. I have also presented alternative perspectives to the dominating view on the ageing population and it's impacts on welfare. In this way I have tried to point out that the subject has a political dimension. In the thesis last section I compare the message presented in the newspapers and the organisations with the characteristics of a political myth.

In this thesis a transport system is sought after thatif realised in the city of Uppsala could provide bothwell-being to all its inhabitants and sustainability,here jointly refered to as liveability. It is found thatthe car dominated transport system that is inoperation today provides two fundamental values,namely accessibility in both time and space, whichsets it apart from other transport solutions. Thesetwo values are of immense importance for theliveability in our modern world. On the other handthe car dominated system decreases the liveabilityof Uppsala in several different ways. Some of theseproblems, it is argued, could be solved within thecar system, through the adoption of moreenvironmentally friendly cars etc., but otherproblems are inherent in the car system and willremain no matter what changes are made.