The first Debt Relief Act was introduced in 1994 into Swedish law. The old Debt Relief Act was replaced on 1 January 2007 by the current Debt Relief Act. The current law is in many ways similar to the older law. The main change is the debt settlement process.The Debt settlement Act's main purpose is to financially rehabilitate over-indebted individuals. This aim should be balanced against the creditors' interest in getting paid for their claims.

This study deals with the road freight sector's capital structure and how leases, loans and equity affect the ratios. The study is based on a ten-year period between 2000-2010 in Sweden. Investments in finance is a complex and interesting subject to study, there are many factors that can affect how the company best choose their investments when they have many great business investment the decisions plays a greater role. The aim is to find an optimal capital structure from a financial investment point of view. The purpose will be answered by the following research question: Are there significant differences between leases, loans and equity financed fleet of factors, profitability, tax, turnover, age, and cyclicality. The study will also examine how debt is related to profit margin, DuPont and the tax, all through a regression analysis. Then were plausible economic theories for the study.

Abstract: Private equity used to be synonymous with tremendous yields and rates of return. However, the private equity market trembled in 2008, due to the financial meltdown caused by the worldwide credit crisis. Considering the current low number of exits within the private equity industry, the purpose of this thesis is to examine if there has been any change in how private equity firms control their portfolio companies since the inception of the crisis. One private equity company and two portfolio companies have been studied. The case study is prepared from interviews with senior directors in the portfolio company and investment managers in the private equity firm.

In a time when economic crises relieving one another, it is especially interesting to study how companies choose to finance their operations. Since there is a lack of studies that include banks, and their capital structures, with the rest of the finance market, it is uncertain whether the theories of capital structure are applicable. Therefore, this essay aims to study whether there is any correlation between the two variables debt-equity ratio and return on equity (ROE) for Swedish corporations on the finance market.In accordance with the theorems that the professors Modigliani and Miller filed, in 1958 and 1961, which describes a clear link between debts, increase corporate value through the tax shield and indirectly increased yields. Although these theorems are the foundation of the modern research they focus on perfect markets. Therefore, this paper has also chosen to place great emphasis on theories such as Trade-off and Pecking-order.

This paper studies the option market?s implied dividend as a predictor of future equity market returns. We introduce this variable in the simple total return framework and discuss some complications of using it as a proxy for the expected dividend. We construct some regressions using the price-dividend ratio and the implied dividend growth, and test them on six years worth of data on the EURO STOXX 50-index. The main result is that implied dividend growth exhibits some forecastability over two-year horizons, but that the dataset is too short to draw any definitive conclusions about long-horizon forecastability.

Uppsatsen behandlar de investeringskriterier och värderingsmetoder som svenska Private Equity-företag använder inför företagsförvärv. Vi har gjort en kvalitativ analys av fem svenska Private Equity-aktörer. Våra slutsater är att de Private Equity-bolag vi studerat har ett fåtal övergripande investeringskriterier men att de är relativt flexibla gällande resterande. Företagen använder sig främst av multipelvärdering i värderingsprocessen. Sammanfattningsvis kan vi konstatera att Private Equity-företagen fokuserar mindre på vad företaget är värt och lägger allt fokus på hur mycket företaget kan avyttras för..

This paper describes and develops a trade off model of optimal capital structure by Bradley et al. (1984). The model is then tested to examine how changes in corporate tax rates affect the optimal capital structure of firms. Based on theoretical implications of the model, four hypotheses are derived stating that firms? optimal debt-to-value ratio is (1) negatively related to financial distress costs, (2) negatively related to non-debt tax shields, (3) negatively related to firm volatility and (4) positively related to the corporate tax rate.

In this paper we investigate 67 Swedish buyouts in the manufacturing and retailing sector between the years 2004-2012. The purpose is to measure changes in a set of financial key ratios to see if private equity firms are able to improve performance in their portfolio companies compared to a peer group consisting of other firms within the same industries. Furthermore, we examine if there is a difference in the change of the financial key ratios between private equity-owned firms in the two sectors. The key results are that the private equity owned firms have not outperformed their peers with respect to the chosen key ratios. We also conclude that there is no significant difference in the change of the financial key ratios between private equity-owned firms in the two sectors..

This thesis describes how large Swedish companies finance their debt and identifies some factors that affect their decisions. The study is based on 10 well-known companies of which 9 are listed on Nasdaq OMX Nordic. The results show that the companies display several similarities concerning their debt structure and the factors which their choices are based upon. All companies in this study primarily use corporate bonds for their long-term borrowing, commercial papers for the short-term borrowing, and bank-facilities as back-up. There is a tendency that smaller companies in larger extent use bank-loans for long-term borrowing due to larger emissions costs when using market financing.

This study aims to build a deeper understanding on how shareholder value is created in Private Equity investments, especially during the holding period. The study is a qualitative study of the buyout of the access security company Bewator AB made by the Swedish Private Equity firm EQT in 2002. The buyout became highly successful due to various reasons. The study draws the conclusion, contrary to popular belief, that Private Equity firms create value through taking a long term view on business developing rather than being short term value destroyers. Incentive alignment is another important factor..

The concept of brand equity emerged inthe eightiesto justify the long term value of marketing investments. Brand equity signify the value that a brand adds to a product and is the result of the marketing of a brand. One of the most widely used strategies to enhance brand equity is to do a brand extension, which means that a firm uses an established brand to introduce a new product to the market. At worst, a failed brand extension can damage the brand equity, which Vinjamuri (2008) claims that the brand Axe is currently in danger of doing. This January Axe launched an extention including products for both men and women for the first time and Vinjamuri claims that this can disappoint Axe´s former target group (men between 14 and 27 years old) (Newman, 2012). In this thesis Axe´s brand equity among the extensions target group (men and women, age 14 to 27) in Sweden is studied to find out if the brand extension is likely to affect the brand equity in the target group.

This study investigates the value relevance of goodwill impairments for equity investors in Swedish listed companies. We provide insight on whether goodwill impairments are value relevant before as well as after the implementation of IFRS 3 and IAS 36. We express market value of equity as a function of book value of equity; net income excluding goodwill impairments and goodwill impairments, using the Ohlson valuation model and Hellström's price regression. Our findings suggest that goodwill impairments are statistically value relevant for equity investors. Prior to the implementation of IFRS 3 and IAS 36, our findings imply that equity investors respond negatively to goodwill impairments.

The relationship between dividend policy and investment is a controversial area and the relationship between these two may differ depending on the company's priorities. The study examines this more closely by studying dividend policy's impact on investment and how it differs depending on the company?s market capitalization. The study is based on companies listed on the OMX Stockholm within the segments Large Cap and Small Cap, during the period between 2003-2012. Secondary data was obtained from each company's annual reports where relevant data was used to operationalized into measurable variables.

Syfte: Studiens syfte är att analysera och undersöka om det finns något samband mellan den finansiella risken och lönsamheten. Det övergripande syftet är att se om valet av finansiell risk fungerar som finansieringsstrategi i verkligheten.Metod: Studien bygger på den deduktiva ansatsen där teorier kommer att testas och analyseras mot empiriska data tagna från årsredovisningar. Den kvantitativa metoden används då data från 305 stycken årsredovisningar ska användas för att finna om det finns samband och variation mellan finansiell risk och lönsamhet definierad som vinstmarginal, Rt och Re. Årsredovisningarna utgörs av sekundärdata som samlats in från databasen Retriever. De statistiska metoder som används är bland annat medelvärde, standardavvikelse, regressions- och korrelationsanalys, hypotesprövning och t-test.Resultat och slutsats: Såväl korrelation- och regressionsanalys som hypotesprövning och t-test visar att det finns samband mellan finansiell risk och lönsamhet definierad som Re.

Previous research has discussed how voluntary disclosure relates to the cost of equity capital. Theories of estimation risk support a negative association between disclosure and cost of equity capital, as empirically documented by Botosan (1997) among others. In this Bachelor thesis we investigate whether such a relationship exists on the Swedish capital market. Using the CAPM to estimate the cost of equity capital and a disclosure index based on Aktiespararen?s annual evaluation of corporate disclosure, we test a model where disclosure explains cost of equity capital.