The recent development in several countries? legislation and best practice recommendations in relation to corporate governance in general and audit committees in particular have affected Swedish listed corporations in the form of the Swedish Corporate Governance Code and the coming EU-directive. This paper aims to discover what factors affected Swedish listed companies to form audit committees when this was entirely voluntary. We collected data from the annual reports of 121 Swedish listed companies and formed eleven hypotheses as to what factors we believed affected the voluntary formation of audit committees based on Agency Theory, economies of scale and circumstances specific to the Swedish environment. We then analyzed the data through the use of a multivariate logistic regression model.

Small business enterprises have escalated in Sweden during the last decade. However, new established companies are struggling to maintain their selves during the startup process and according to a survey from Tillväxtanalys, only 68 % of startup companies from 2008 were still active three years later. One of the main reasons is lack of capital and the most common approach to finance companies is to apply for a bank loan. In other words, commercial banks are of great importance for new businesses. Although, the problem arises when there is no previous history from the new businesses that the bank could base its credit assessment on.

There is a mutual dependency between the business world and the country?s municipalities. The municipalities are dependent on the companies to create work and tax income while the companies are dependent on the municipalities they are located in to provide good infrastructure among other things.Apart from this the municipalities can work activly with creating a strong brand in the eyes of the companies and many researchers in marketing agree that marketing of places will be more common in the future. Marketing of municipalities is however still a rather new and unexplored area and it is uncertain how and to what extent the municipalities work with this.The thesis is formulated:How are the municipalities working to market towards companies and is it possible to make out any positive change from these marketing efforts?The goal of this study is:Our goal is to examine how the view of marketing of places differs from different municipalities in the Stockholm region, how some of these municipalities work with this and how far they have come in this work.

There is a growing awareness that multinational companies have opportunities to influence political conditions. Ethical activities made by multinational companies and ?Corporate Social Responsibility? (CSR) can therefore function as a positive input in society. The primary purpose of this master thesis is to investigate CSR´s contribution to strengthen human rights, and thereby to democratization. The research questions are listed below:1.

Interest deduction limitation rules have an important function as the regulations prevent the Swedish tax base to decrease. However, the restrictions must not be at the expense of the business environment. Interest deduction limitation rules that do not work in a satisfactory manner are likely to make Sweden a less favourable country to establish in. The first Swedish rules which were aimed to restrict interest deduction threaded into force in 2009. The rules were applicable to intercompany loans related to acquisitions of part ownership rights and the aim was to reduce tax avoidance through corporate group-loans. The rules proved to be ineffective since the avoidance continued and the Swedish rules could not tackle the problem.

Studiens primära syfte är att undersöka hur målgruppen potentiellt framtida kvinnliga arbetssökande upplever det språkliga tilltalet i nätbanken Nordnets platsannonser. Hypotesen att det språkliga tilltalet i Nordnets platsannonser bär spår av manliga drag och attraherar män i högre utsträckning än kvinnor är en central utgångspunkt för undersökningen som görs. Ett sekundärt syfte med studien är även att ur språkvetenskapligt perspektiv undersöka hur de relationsskapande strategierna ser ut i fem slumpmässigt utvalda platsannonser från Nordnet.Studien utgår från frågeställningar som berör attityder till det språkliga tilltalet och hur platsannonsernas relationsskapande strategier associeras med manligt eller kvinnligt språk. Frågeställningarna besvaras med hjälp av två kvantitativa metoder: en enkätundersökning samt en textanalys, vars resultat legat till grund för enkätundersökningens utformning. 39 respondenter deltog i enkätundersökningen, varav 22 kvinnor och en kontrollgrupp på 17 män.

How capital structure influences corporate performance and value has been in the interest of researchers and scholars for more than half a century, but an answer is yet to be found. The main objective of the present paper is to contribute with data for this cause and hopefully help to clarify this mystery. The method that was used was by analyzing the impact of debt on profitability and market valuation through linear regression. The study examined 17 Swedish property companies listed on Nasdaq OMX Large Mid and Small Cap over a 6 year period (2007-2012). The authors found a slightly negative relationship between debt-to-equity and profitability measured by return on equity (ROE) as well as by return on assets (ROA).

I decennier har problematiken kring förvaltning belysts och i mångt och mycket har motpolerna aktiv- och passiv förvaltning jämförts. Tidigare forskning har påvisat att passiv förvaltning är att föredra framför aktiv förvaltning, bland annat på grund av de dyra förvaltningsavgifterna samt att förespråkarna antar en effektiv marknad. Ämnesområdet är ett väl utforskat område dock i högsta grad aktuellt. Tidigare forskning har inte belyst aktivitetsgraden i aktivt förvaltade fonder och därmed gavs implikation till fortsatt analysområde för den här studien.Syftet med uppsatsen är att analysera om aktivitetsgraden i aktivt förvaltade fonder kan förklara den riskjusterade avkastningen med hänsyn tagen till förvaltningsavgiften. En deduktiv ansats kommer tillämpas för utveckling av existerande teori.

?Runda Upp? En Corporate-Social-Responsibility-metod med en Positivt eller Negativt påverkan? En kvantitativ studie om ?Runda Upp? ur ett konsumentperspektiv Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka konsumenters intryck av företag som i samarbete med icke-statliga organisationer tillämpar CSR och mer specifikt metoden ?Runda Upp?. Huruvida intrycken blir mer positiva eller negativa eller om intrycken förblir lika då textilföretag använder sig av ?Runda Upp?-metoden som CSR-aktivitet. Vi ämnar även undersöka om metoden påverkar konsumenters köpbeteende.

The purpose with this essay is to explore the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) within the food industry. We have decided to focus on how five different ethical labels are communicated towards students and the standpoint of the study is the students understanding of the communication. The labels that we have chosen to examine in the study are KRAV, Fairtrade, Svanen, Ekologiskt Jordbruk and Rainforest Alliance. The primary research question in the study is? How are the students purchase behavior affected by ethical labels in the food industry??.Throughout the study we will refer to CSR-products as products are stamped with one or several of the named ethical labels.

This paper aims to derive the Black-Scholes equation for readers without advanced knowledge in finance and mathematics. To succeed, this paper contains a theoretical chapter in which concepts such as options, interest rate, differential equations and stochastic variable are explained. This paper also presents the theory of stochastic processes such as the Wiener process and Ito process. In the chapter on the Black-Scholes model the Ito process is used to describe price of shares and with the help of Ito's lemma Black-Scholes equation can be derived. In the paper, assumptions are listed that apply to the Black-Scholes model and then uses the Black-Scholes equation to calculate the price of a European call option.

Syfte: Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka hur småföretag väljer mellan olika finansieringsformer. Metod: För att uppfylla uppsatsens syfte så har vi tillämpat en kvalitativ metod, där en studie genomförts genom semistrukturerade intervjuer med företagare i fyra utvalda småföretag. Slutsatser: Denna undersökning visar på att småföretag bland olika finansieringsalternativ har mest kunskap om bankfinansiering, varför metoden känns trygg och således ofta tillämpas av småföretagare. Kunskapen om andra finansieringsalternativ är bristfällig, och det anses för tid- och kostnadskrävande att skaffa sig kunskap tillräcklig djup nog för att kunna förankra finansieringsbeslut i. .

Bakgrund: Förutsättningar för företag förändras ständigt. Samtidigt har kunder och anställda fått nya betydelsefulla roller för hur verksamheten utformas och vilka värderingar som företaget arbetar efter. Företagen förväntas i allt högre grad ta ett aktivt samhällsansvar, men satsningarna har hittills varit för kortsiktiga och inte visat på några ekonomiska resultat. Samhällsansvaret bör därför ses ur ett långsiktigt perspektiv och förankras strategiskt i företagets affärsidé.Problemformulering: Vilka faktorer är viktiga för att företag ska kunna överföra långsiktigt samhällsansvar till sin affärsidé?Syfte: Att analysera och utvärdera sambandet mellan interna strategier och överensstämmelsen mellan ledning och anställda med avseende på samhällsansvar.Metod: Uppsatsen bygger på en kvalitativ undersökning utifrån en deduktiv ansats.

Background: The design industry is relatively immature in Sweden but large on the international market, where companies have used services from industrial design firms for a long time. Companies incresignly realise that design is an efficient mean to gain competitive advantages on the market. Several design companies fancy growth and to receive a wider market share to expand on the international market. One of them is Design Communicaton who has made a couple of acquisitions, to receive wider comptences and to cover different segments. That has lead to an increased brand portfolio with different subbrands, which can be complicated to handle efficiently in the internal and external communication.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to adjusting corporate goals so that they are not only based on maximizing corporate profits, but include ethical standards on socially desirable behavior (Boatright, 2008). Even though many companies have integrated CSR into their business operations, there are still many issues that are difficult to tackle. Especially Multinational Corporations (MNCs) in the global business environment face many challenging situations due to the fact that they often have linkages to countries where the local government is either unwilling or unable to take care of its responsibilities. MNCs often find themselves with increased responsibilities when they start solving some of the issues that earlier have been the sole responsibility of states. A specific case situation discussed in this paper is related to ?conflict minerals?.