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.

The EU market is being deregulated, which sees Swedish farmers that have traditionally been governed by different support systems being forced to adapt to a free market system and having to deal with the concept of supply and demand. The farming sector has during the past several years experienced harder conditions and the deregulation of the market has directly affected farmers. The need for entrepreneurs and that way of thinking has been identified (McElwee, 2006). Swedish farmers are neither familiar with a free market or being required to think in an entrepreneurial manner, does this therefore implicate that Swedish farmers are not entrepreneurs?LRF is a national farmers? organization in Sweden and functions as a support for Swedish farmers.

Energy supply in Sweden year 2011 amounted to 577 TWh. The final energy consumption for industrial, residential and service was 379 TWh. Sweden has energy policy goals to reduce energy use in buildings. One of these goals is to reduce the energy use by 20 % in 2020 compared to the year 1995. An important step to achieve this goal is to target energy efficiency measures in existing buildings.

The purpose of the study is to examine and analyze the relation between the existence of global companies and given support to immigrant- owned companies with large cultural difference from public services. This helps answering the question "Which affect does the existence of local dominating companies have on the establishment of small companies owned by immigrants with large cultural differences?" This has been accomplished through a field study containing twelve interviews with small companies in two different cities and two interviews with the community officials in each city. The research was thereby narrowed to only treat the two cities in Sweden in order to examine the relation between public services support to small immigrant-owned companies and how the immigrants experience the support from them. The analyze was made due to a handful of theories such as the The network theory IP model, Hofstede's 4+1 model and the Product Life Cycle.

Syftet med studien var att belysa socialsekreterarnas psykosociala arbetsmiljö och undersöka om det fanns ett samband mellan deras psykosociala arbetsmiljö och kvaliteten på arbetet de utför där hypotesen var att ett sådant samband existerar. Undersökningen genomfördes bland alla socialsekreterare i Värmlands län genom en webbenkät. Populationen bestod av 284 socialsekreterare varav 171 svarade på enkäten vilket gav en svarsfrekvens på 60,2 %. De teoretiska utgångspunkterna för studien har varit Karasek och Theorells krav-kontroll-stöd modell samt Socialtjänstlagen, 3 Kap. 3 §, tillsammans med Socialstyrelsens kvalitetsområden.

This thesis is divided in to two different parts. The first part includes examination of the measurementsystem of an industrial robot using a resolver sensor. The main focus is on methods for suppressing noise in the angularvelocity signal without increasing timedelay. Five different methods are investigated. Three of these are based on oversampling: burstsamplingmethod, meanvaluemethod and correlationmethod.

This study aims to examine the effect management control systems have on which goals health centers prioritize. The management control systems of one privately owned and one publicly owned health center have been studied through a qualitative case study. Robert Simons (1995) framework with four levers of control (diagnostic control systems, interactive control systems, belief systems and boundary systems) has been used to structure the study. For both health centers we found a conflict of interest mainly between the diagnostic control system and the beliefs system, where the diagnostic control system is biased towards quantitative goals and the beliefs system is mainly biased towards qualitative goals. However, despite the unbalanced levers of control the studied health centers have been able to reach a well functioning compromise between quantitative and qualitative goals..

This thesis will address a problem concerning availability of information systems at an enterprise within the financial sector and its external suppliers, so called trusted third party. The information system resides on the internal network of the enterprise and must be available to both employees of the enterprise and the trusted third party simultaneously. This contradicts the company policy which disallows third parties access to the internal network. The HAVECA-model introduced in this thesis provides a framework of methods, each solving a sub problem identified in the model. The identified methods are hardening, verification, control and assurance, together supplying a method for continuously securing the internal network against a trusted third party.

Asset management in insurance companies differs from conventional asset management to the extent that respect has to be taken to both assets and the commitments the insurance company has towards its customers. A model that has proven to fit well regarding the matching of assets and liabilities is the Asset Liability Management Model (ALM model). In addition to the matching in the balance sheet, the ALM model can be used in a company's work with strategic portfolio allocation by applying it as a basis for analyzing investment strategies with expected risk and return. From this, the ALM model also becomes relevant for calculating key figures according to the legal framework Solvens II which includes laws and regulations regarding the demands on economical strength (solvens) of insurance companies.Hence, the goal of this masters thesis has been to, on behalf of Bliwa Livförsäkring, create an ALM model to support the asset management department of Bliwa in their work with defining a credible way of analyzing the future risk and return of Bliwa's asset portfolio and insurance undertakings.The ALM model generally consist of four submodels, the scenario model, the liability model, the asset model and the company model, where the scenario model often is named as the core of the ALM model. The course of action has been to develop these submodels individually, with focus on the scenario model.

Today small metal parts are mass-produced as for example rollers in cylinder bearings. At high velocity cutting the metal is cut with a great force in a scissor-like device. Both precision and repeatability is important to be able to guarantee good quality, but from an economical point of view it is also important to keep a great manufacturing capacity. The part of the process that is most time consuming is when the metal bar, that is about to be cut, is fed to the right position. Therefore it is interesting to examine if the time used for positioning can be reduced.

The purpose of this project was to evaluate how energy efficiently some of JM?s residential buildings can become in standard production. What kind of measures are needed to achieve the level of energy demand that is included in BBR12 (Boverkets Byggregler)? What measures are needed for achieving a lower demand so that the buildings could be classified as passive houses? The investigation has included a single family house and two different types of apartment blocks.The simulation programs Enorm and VIP+ have been used to calculate the energy demand of the buildings. The results from the programs have been compared with the measured energy demand for the three buildings.

Siblings of persons with disabilities tend to be sidelined and not get the same attention in the same amount as the child with the disability gets, both by the parents and the society. Previous research in this area is limited and siblings of people with disabilities and their experiences of support needs to be explored. The purpose of this paper is to learn about support for siblings of people with disabilities in terms of both adult siblings own experiences from his childhood and from practitioners experience. Six qualitative interviews with four adult siblings of people with disabilities and two professionals were interviewed. Systems Theory and Bronfenbrenners ecological model has provided the theoretical basis for the essay.

Although Lean has received an increased amount of attention in the service context, research still has not established how successfully Lean manages to increase service productivity; since service productivity consists of both efficiency and quality. Research regarding productivity discusses the risk of a tradeoff between efficiency and quality in service production processes. Therefore, this thesis aims to explore if the tradeoff in a production setting with low variability in demand and low customer participation exists, after Lean has been implemented. With a qualitative approach, a case study has been conducted at Scandinavian Airlines Ground Handling to evaluate the effects of Lean in the baggage handling process. The result of the study shows that the tradeoff has not been overcome; efficiency has increased at the expense of quality.

Locus of control och självkänslaEn jämförelse mellan elit- och icke elitidrottareHelén BlomstrandBesitter individen en hög inre locus of control anser denne attindividen själv är ansvarig för valen denne gör i livet, medan en högyttre locus of control innebär det motsatta. Syftet med studien varbland annat att se om elit- och icke elitidrottare skiljde sig gällandelocus of control; får elitidrottarna högre förvärvade än traitbaseradeinre attityder gällande självkänsla och locus of control, än ickeelitidrottare, har locus of control samband med självkänsla. Enenkätundersökning genomfördes på 82 idrottare varav 42elitidrottare. Resultatet visade att elitidrottarna uppvisade signifikanthögre resultat gällande inre locus of control än icke elitidrottarnasamt att det fanns könsskillnader då männen uppvisade högre värdengällande en inre work locus of control. Resultatet indikerar även attbassjälvkänsla har ett positivt samband med locus of control.Diskussionen fördes kring om en högre inre locus of control ledertill bättre idrottsliga resultat samt kritisk granskning av gällandeuppsats.Keywords: locus of control, external and internal, athletes, self-esteem.

District heating covers around 80 % of the heating demand in apartment buildings and 10 % in single-family homes in Sweden. In the year 2010 the total input of energy to the Swedish district heating grids was about 70 TWh, which corresponds to 11 % of the total energy input to the whole energy system in the country. Through the combined production of heat and power the CHP-plants often reaches an efficiency of 90 % from energy in the fuel to produced heat and power. In order to keep the efficiency high it is important for the owners of the plant to have good knowledge about the plants performance at different operation points. Strängnäs Energi AB initiated this diploma work together with FVB Sverige ab in order to come up with a program for short term planning of the production of heat and power at the company´s CHP-plant.The work consists of three main parts.