A change of generations occurs several times during a company?s lifetime. It is a process that requires planning and time. If the current owner wants to keep the company within the family, he has two options; he can either sell the company to a family member, or give the company to the new owner, like a gift. When the owner sells the company, it is common that he accomplishes it to a losing price.

Syftet är att analysera vilka variabler som påverkar performance positivt i nystartade BioMed och ITT-företag och i denna process även beskriva och jämföra hur dessa variabler ser ut i de två branschgrupperna och hur företagen har utvecklats. Vi har använt oss av en kvantitativ metod och har genom ett enkätutskick fått empiriskt material från 20 grundare av BioMed-företag och från 30 grundare av ITT-företag. Slutsatserna är att i BioMed påverkas nystartade företags performance positivt av: grundarens ålder, arbetserfarenhet, branschkunskap, start-up-erfarenhet och ett heterogent nätverk. Nystartade ITT-företags performance påverkas positivt av : grundarens ålder, utbildningsnivå, arbetserfarenhet, branschkunskap, antalet grundare, initial kapitalmängd i företaget och att ha affärsänglar och riskkapitalbolag som kapitalkälla. Connects olika insatser får generellt sett inte bra betyg av grundarna och därmed drar vi slutsatsen att Connects betydelse för företagens performance inte är stor.

The fact that a duty of loyalty within the Swedish company law exists should be regarded as indisputable according to the Swedish doctrine, but its content and scope is however more severe identified. As the duty of loyalty is not regulated in the ABL and the fact that there are not many precedents in this area, means that it is difficult to know the boundaries of the company management´s duty of loyalty. It is also unclear whether the company management´s duty of loyalty to the company also is targeting the shareholders. It is this issue that we intend to discuss in the final chapter of this thesis. In order to answer our questions, we will in chapter two to six give an account of the foundation of the duty of loyalty and thereafter describe the management's duty of loyalty to the company.

Background and problem discussion: Sustainability reporting has recently risen in importance and a rising number of companies choose to issue voluntary stand-alone sustainability reports. Their non-regulated nature increases the opportunity for management to angle the information in these disclosures to their own advantage. Lately the focus has shifted from examining what kind of information is provided in environmental disclosures, to analyzing how the information is presented.Purpose: The purpose is to examine if managers in the energy sector use optimistic tone when issuing sustainability reports. The aim is to find out if the tone applied in environmental disclosures is in congruence with either the environmental or economic performance or if an excessively positive tone is being used to mislead readers.Limitations: This study is limited to information found in environmental disclosures from private companies in the energy sector, issued in 2012 or 2013. Environmental performance is defined as the amount of CO2e emissions and economic performance refers to annual company revenues.Methodology: The quantification of optimistic tone is conducted using a content analysis, relying on a pre-specified wordlist and a pilot study.

The rising demand for electricity and heat raises a big challange for the society and engineers. Many products have been introduced to the market to supply more energy to the energy systems. Absolicon AB is a Swedish company that develops and markets a combined heat and power generating product. The product, Absolicon X10, uses a parabolic trough to concentrate the radiation of the sun onto a receiver. The receiveris equipped with mono crystalline solar cells and is cooled by a circulating liquid media.

This master?s thesis examines the possibility to heuristically optimise instruction cache performance in a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler. Programs that do not fit inside the cache all at once may suffer from cache misses as a result of frequently executed code segments competing for the same cache lines. A new heuristic algorithm LHCPA was created to place frequently executed code segments to avoid cache conflicts between them, reducing the overall cache misses and reducing the performance bottlenecks. Set-associative caches are taken into consideration and not only direct mapped caches.

This paper examines how companies in a transparent industry work to satisfy the customer in an extended way, to offer value added products that in the end enables the customer to be loyal to the company. We have studied the insurance industry in Sweden and have focused on five different insurance companies. Four of them, Folksam, Länsförsäkringar, Trygg-Hansa and Dina Försäkringar, where we have focused on Ölands Försäkringar which is part of the Dina Försäkringar group, are some of the largest insurance companies in Sweden. The fourth company is Swedbank which is a bank that has started to offer insurances.Our results demonstrate that it is important for the company to see the customer not only in a profitability aspect; the company has to find out what the customer gets in return. In that case the possibility for the customer to change company decreases and the chance that the customer becomes loyal increases.

To be able to protect themselves from credit risk, the banks must constantly check the performance of  the companies they have lent money to. There are many mathematical models for predicting financial distress. These models use accounting-based ratios, which often are historical and not representative for the present situation. This study describes how the banks do in practice to find signals of insolvency in time and the variables they are observing for doing that.In addition to financial reports which the company sends in to the bank at least once a year, also the relationship between them and information from different information  agencies are of great importance to track  signals of insolvency. Poor profitability is the primary cause of insolvency.

 Performance appraisals- a study of the performance appraisals significance as a tool for development in the public sector.Anders Larsson and Åsalill OlssonPerformance appraisals have been given a central role in leading businesses in the public sector and are seen as a tool to create development opportunities and achieve better results. This has resulted that performance appraisal in many organizations takes up capacity and time. This was the starting point of our interest to study whether the time spent on performance appraisals effectively pays for itself in the organization, in other words whether the effects expected actually are achieved. The paper examines first line managers` views on staff appraisal purposes and effects of a function within the Landstinget. The survey design, methodology and transaction are of qualitative and quantitative method with three different sources: literature review of previous research, interviews with first line managers in Landstinget Västmanland and the results from an employee satisfaction survey conducted on behalf of Landstinget Västmanland.

Background: It is today common for companies to provide some sort of incentive for CEO's and senior management positions to motivate, retain and benefit employees within a company. This is in order to drive the goals of the CEO and management in the direction that is desired by the owner. Currently, the Swedish centre-right government has forbidden the use of such variable pay within state-owned companies. There are two different attitudes to variable pay, one that is in favour and one that rejects it. However most people agree on the fact that a well-functioning incentive scheme can be of great strategic importance for a company.Approach: has variable pay to CEO's had any effect on the company's profitability.Aim: the aim of the study is to compare companies who use variable pay to CEO's with companies that do not in relation to their profitability in terms of profit margins, yearly performance, returns on total capital and returns on equity.Method: the study uses a quantitative approach.

I denna kvalitativa studie har utvecklingssamtal och dess betydelse för performance undersökts. De frågeställningar som studien utgår ifrån rör hur chefer ser på utvecklingssamtal, vilka möjligheter och hinder som finns kopplade till dem, hur de kan utvecklas samt om det finns faktorer som kan ha betydelse för att påverka företagets strävan mot performance. För att besvara frågeställningarna intervjuades nio chefer och resultatet presenteras utifrån frågeställningarna.Utvecklingssamtal kopplat till performance var inte självklart för cheferna att resonera om, då många inte funderat kring detta tidigare. Det framkommer att samtliga chefer är positivt inställda till utvecklingssamtal. Cheferna ger också uttryck för olika möjligheter och hinder i utvecklingssamtalen.

Abstract (in English)The work that lead to a CE- marking and the creation of a total drawing foundation on an existing machine carried out on the company Polytec Composites Sweden AB in Ljungby. The company have design an machine that exist in six example that runs in the production. To be able to use the machine the company have to work out a CE-marking. The process that summed up all the document that needs for the machine to make a CE-marking. The documentation includes a total drawing over the machine and a risk analysis performed by a group employers on the company.

During the late twentieth century, political and societal changes gave rise to an increased interest in performance evaluation in public organizations. This development also affected libraries in the public sector. The main concern for this master thesis is performance measurement in libraries. In this study two different types of libraries are investigated, one public and the other academic. My aim is to find out if and how performance measurement appears in the libraries annual activity reports.

In Sweden the real estate sector accounts for 33 % of energy consumption and just below 10 % of the emission of carbon dioxide. As a consequence of the external pressure from climate change it?s in everybody?s interest to reduce the energy consumption and thus reduce the emission of carbon dioxide. An additional incentive to reduce the energy consumption is the substantial increase of the energy price since the deregulation of the electricity market in 1996.In this study the techniques that exist to build multi-storey residential buildings with high energy performance will be investigated. Further the study intends to investigate the optimal energy performance from a real estate economic perspective.In order to investigate the optimal energy performance a model has been created with the parameters investment cost, rental revenues, operation and maintenance cost, discount rate and investment horizon.The result shows a relationship between a high investment cost and a high energy performance for newly constructed multi-storey residential buildings.

3nine has developed oil mist separators for the manufacturing industry. They are used in factories and workshops in Sweden as well as many other countries. The basis for this thesis is to investigate the performance of these separators in applied environments under different circumstances and to find factors that influence the performance. It has been shown both theoretically and in laboratory environments that the sizes of the particles in the oil mist influences the performance of separation. This is to be verified under applied circumstances as well.The separators also have in most cases, after the centrifugal separation, HEPA-filters mounted that separates the remaining oil mist.