Essay in Political Science, C-level, by Camila Alvarez Cea, spring semester 2010. Tutor: Alf Sundin?Reality or a Political Mirage? ? A Study of the Swedish Press Views on the Health Insurance Reform in the USA? The purpose of this essay is partly to examine whether the picture that Swedish press presents of the health insurance reform in the US, which is part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Act bill, will be of crucial importance to the possibilities that the American population has to receive health insurance. The main research question is accordingly: ?Does the picture that Swedish press presents of the health insurance reform in the USA, seem like something that will be of radical importance to the possibilities of the population to receive healthcare?? The purpose is also to examine in which model (demand or market) the opinions of the Swedish press fits. This purpose will be answered by using three specific questions asking whether their opinions differ when it comes to three criterions: organization, financing/resources and delivery systems.

Year 1996 a new law was introduced in Sweden, the law of corporate restructuring, what purpose was to help companies in financial distress. Now, nine years later the procedure hasn?t been successful. This is what this thesis is trying to find out.This thesis main question is: What distinguishes the companies that have filed for a corporate restructuring, according to the financial position?The purpose of this thesis is to find out if key ratios can be used to distinguish the companies that filed for corporate restructuring.

The purpose of this essay is to examine how four Swedish retail companies describe their information management in connection to ethical trade. My purpose is also to examine how this information management relates to organizational learning. My questions at issue are ? ?Which activities related to information management in connection to ethical trade is described by the companies?? and ?How can these activities and statements be related to organizational learning?? My method of investigation is to perform qualitative interviews with representatives from the retail companies and relate the results to theories on information management and organizational learning, mainly theories of double-loop- and single-loop learning. The information management literature address issues such as information needs, information sources and information seeking.

The question about how the unemployment insurance should be designed is today a veryinteresting topic. In 2007 the Swedish government introduced an increased financial fee formembers in the unemployment benefit societies. Since this the number of members in thesesocieties has decreased dramatically. At the same time Sören Öman was appointed head of acommission whose obligation was to investigate the initiation of compulsory unemploymentinsurance. In May 2008 Öman delivered a separate report describing how the initiation of theinsurance should be dealt with.

All companies face risk in their daily business. Internationalised companies tend to experience higher risk due to for example unfamiliar business environment than companies that act only on the national market. Estonia became independent as late as in 1991 and is therefore a new interesting market for many companies in neighbouring countries like Sweden. Risks that are most apparent for an internationalised company are political risk, currency risk, capital and interest rate risk, business risk and credit risk. Our intention of this study was to find out how Swedish companies acting on the Estonian market faced the different risks when entering the Estonian market and how they value the risks today.

In 2011 the International Accounting Standards Board issued amendments to IAS 19 Employee Benefits. The new standard is effective from January 1st 2013 and one of the largest changes in the standard is the elimination of the corridor method. Through the corridor method companies had the possibility to defer actuarial gains and losses resulting from their defined benefit obligations (pension obligations) and leave them unrecognized off the balance sheet. According to the new standard companies reporting under International Financial Reporting Standards will have to recognize all actuarial gains and losses immediately in other comprehensive income. The aim of this thesis is to examine how the financial key ratios of Swedish listed companies will be affected by the elimination of the corridor method.

The purpose of our essay is to investigate and compare the general and operational risk management in the private and public sector. As an introduction to the subject we describe the differences and similarities between the two sectors. Our survey is based on the term risk, the definitions of risk management, its development and finally the process of risk management. Since our survey is focusing on operational risks we also describe the operational process and the specific operational risks.The method we used to investigate the subject is a quantitative method. A survey was sent to 100 companies in Sweden, of which 50 were private companies and 50 were public companies.

Insurance terms always go with the insurance contract that you sign. In theseterms the assurers rights and obligations towards the insurer are stipulated. It is often difficult to interpret these insurance terms. Sometimes it is hard to decide whether an incident is considered an insurance event or not. These problems often cause disputes between the assurer and the insurer.

The purpose of this thesis is to ascertain the main determinable factors of Swedish SMEs capital structure decisions and to investigate whether existing capital structure theories are applicable on Swedish SME financing. We have used panel data to run regressions of various capital structure determinants on three measures of capital structure; short- term debt, long-term debt and total debt. We found that growth opportunities, profitability and age are the most important capitalstructures determinants for our sample. Firm size shows a small explanatory result but the effective tax rate and the asset tangibility do not seem to explain the capital structure at all. Thematurity matching principle is considered significant..

The aim of this thesis is to examine the occurrence of Cosmetic Earnings Management (CEM) among Swedish companies. CEM refers to the small upward rounding of reported net income to reach cognitive reference points. Important cognitive reference points are multiples of ten (N*10^x) of reported net income and rounding towards these has been documented in other markets around the world over the last 20 years. The occurrence of CEM on the Swedish market is studied using digital analysis, frequency testing and Benford's law. Firstly, reported net income of publicly traded companies between 1996 and 2010 is examined.

During the last few years the alcohol consumption has increased and is now the highest in 100 years, one usually count that 10 % of the grown up population abuse alcohol and/or drugs and most of them are hidden abusers with families and work. This leads to great costs for the companies. But the much greater cost for the companies are the much larger group of risk abusers. According to the Swedish law the employer has a responsibility for the work milieu and also for the rehabilitate for the employed and drug/alcohol abuse applies to this.I have done qualitative interviews on four companies in the south of Sweden with one representa-tive for the management and one representative for the union. I have investigated their attitudes to alcohol and drugs and how they describe the alcohol culture at the company.The companies define alcohol problems when they are established and obvious and when it is dis-covered they put in resources and because of this they don't work preventive so much.

On the 26th of January 2010, the Supreme Administrative Court in Sweden gave five rulings which greatly affect the possibility to keep a close company within a family by transferring the ownership of the company to the next generation. The five rulings concern the interpretation of the prerequisite, same or similar activity, which can be found in section 57, clause 4 of the Swedish Income Tax Act.    The prerequisite is fulfilled when an entire or parts of a business is transferred to another close company and the receiving company?s business activity is within the framework of the transferring company?s business activity or when the companies have a similar connection. Depending on which shares that are being evaluated, the prerequisite can refer to both the shares in the receiving or the transferring company. When the prerequisite is fulfilled, a standardized amount of the business income will be taxed as capital gains and the surplus will be taxed as earned income.

Background: Companies with a high level of research, such as biotech companies, rarely generates any profit in the begining. Mostly their history is short and their pipelines usually consists of one or a few products only. Significant for the line of business is also a future very uncertain, where relevant objects of comparison are few. Altogether the facts above makes valuation of Biotech companies difficult. Swedish Biotech companies, compared to their american competitors, seem to be of relatively low value.

In the proposition Nya förmånsrättsregler, 2002/03:49, the government suggests a new bill of beneficial rights, or FRL. The proposition has several changes, mostly for The Banking system. One of the changes is that the banks´ individual beneficial rights shall be replaced by a general beneficial right, where the beneficial value never exceeds 55 percent of the value of insurance bonds. Previously, the beneficial value was 100 percent.The purpose of this essay is to evaluate the relationship between the banks´ activities, and the new bill of beneficial rights, especially what the effects will become for the public companies within the printing houses, with 1 - 49 employees in the Skåne Region.The survey includes a total of 142 companies and it was distributed via e-mail. The conclusions from the study are that there are tendencies of increased difficulties for companies to get their credits granted by the banks.

A new code for corporate governance was introduced for major companies in Sweden in July 2005. This act is to some degree a follower to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that was introduced in the U.S.A. after the Enron scandal. The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the effect on the controller in response to the introduction of this new act. Three controllers in major Swedish companies was interviewed and asked if and how they had been affected by this new act.