One could argue that the most discussed topic in finance is whether or not it is possible to ?beat the market?. Even though many people claim to do this, there is little evidence to support the idea that one can consistently beat the market over a long period of time. There are indeed several examples of investors who have managed to outperform the market consistently for a long time, but the efforts of these individuals or institutions could by many be considered to be pure luck.One of the many strategies that have been evaluated by several researchers and is said to generate a risk adjusted return greater than that of the market, is one based on the P/E-effect. This strategy is based on the financial ratio P/E ? price divided by earnings ? and used by constructing portfolios consisting of stocks with low P/E ratios.

Syftet med denna uppsats var att studera om det finns en målgradient vid investeringsbedömning som medför en preferens för alternativ med kort återbetalningstid och snabba belöningar. Vi valde att genomföra denna studie med hjälp av en kvantitativ ansats, då vi genomförde ett experiment med studenter vid Blekinge Tekniska Högskola. Detta motiverar vi med att utifrån vårt syfte och vår teoretiska referensram, ger det oss störst möjlighet att generera ett intressant och relevant resultat. Vårt resultat visar tydligt att beslutsfattare föredrar att använda återbetalningsregeln före nettonuvärdesmetoden i en beslutssituation, och därmed ett fokus på tidsaspekten och när en investering är återbetald. 81 % av våra respondenter valde tidsalternativet i minst ett av de två casen.

Purpose: Corporations today see a greater responsibility towards society regarding the environmental impact of their actions, using available transportation options that are more eco-friendly can reduce this impact significantly. Martinsen and Björklund (2012) identifies a set of gaps between supply and demand of green logistics services. This paper aims to address what it is that affects the demand for these alternative solutions and what could be done to increase the usage of them, thereby decreasing this gap.Design/methodology/approach: A quantitative study with six Logistics Service Providers (LSP) and 24 companies that purchase transportation services, all operating in Sweden. Data is collected through semi-structured telephone interviews with people responsible for the purchasing of transports as well as key account managers within the service providing companies.Findings: Just as the LSP?s interviewed in this paper thought, the main focus of the transport buying companies are the costs.

Facial expressions are a part of our body language that helps us to clarify the verbal communication between humans. We use our facial expressions every day, both consciously and unconsciously, to express emotions and attitudes depending on the situation. The hypothesis of the study is: Given a facial expression, how well can Microsoft Kinect, as an input method, determine a person?s feelings with the two algorithms Naive Bayes and Sequential Minimal Optimization? The feelings are limited to happy, sad, surprised and disgusted. With the help of Kinect, a person?s facial data, both coordinates of the face and parameterized data, were saved and used for machine learning.

AbstractThe purpose of this essay is to investigate the priority rules in the event of termination due to redundancy, the rules functions according to the Swedish labour market and which other alternatives that exist besides the priority rules. The alternatives to the priority rules which are introduced in the essay are the Danish Flexicurity-model and a proposal from the Långtidsutredningen 2011. The rule of priority is a very controversial law at the Swedish labour market, which makes the essay also describing the criticism against the rules. The criticism that the essay presents claims that the rules of priority contribute to immobility effects for particularly older employees. Further on the essay presents the criticism towards the rules, that they disadvantage young employees on the labour market.  The essay investigates also what the researchers say about the criticism.The results that are presented in the essay points to the fact that the rules of priority contributes to the immobility effects of employees but the rules can not be claimed to be the only reason.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the price effect on the initial day of trading of IPOs and the price effect on the announcement day of SEOs on Stockholm Stock Exchange. A second purpose it to conduct studies on which factors influencing the price effects and if these factors can be explained by the same fundamental ideas. Theories regarding capital structure and the pricing of IPOs and SEOs are covered. The capital structure theories involve; Miller and Modigliani's cost of captial theory, Static Tradeoff Model and the Pecking Order. The Efficient Market Hypothesis is presented and previous theories are investigated.

In the current situation in the housing market and in particular the inner city much attention is directed towards achieved prices per square meter in sales. The indicator is as a principle an appropriate measure of the housing market?s health and development, and can to some extent be used to make approximations of the general economic health status of municipalities and counties. It occurs occasionally that questions about whether prices are based on fundamentals at all times.The thesis questions that very issue, not from a macro accompanying financial perspective but rather from a microeconomic perspective, where each tenant ownership in the study is a micro-object. Are the observed prices per square meter rational relative to housing cooperative?s assets or is there a lack in the observed prices anchoring the respective association's finances.

Many organizational changes have been accomplished in elder care since the 1980's and many of those have been influenced by market mechanisms. The purpose of this study is to examine how the implementation of these market mechanisms has affected three important aspects in the work situation for personnel. These aspects are, demand, control and support. To attain the purpose of this study, five qualitative interviews with home care personnel have been carried out. The interview material has been analyzed and structured with the help of Karasek and Theorells demand-control-support model.

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.

BackgroundAccording to the Swedish Statistics Central Office (SCB) there were 2 064 000 detached houses in Sweden in 2009. The same year Nordea Bank released a report which described an increased interest in private finances among 2,4 million Swedes. Within the area of private finances lies that which concerns real estate. We argue that a house (detached house) is one of the most financially valuable assets a person will ever own and thus the increased interest in private finance is justified.In regard to this, the financial valuation of the property becomes an issue. When discussed, people mostly refer to the market value, which is the estimated value of the property on the open market.

As more and more book publishers are starting up in Sweden, despite of tough competition, this thesis aims to understand the necessary resources required by new publishing houses in order to create a long-term role on the national publishing market. This is a market characterized by a high level of cultural interests, where success is not always measured in economic profit. Four new publishing houses have been chosen, whose start-up phases and entry processes are described in order to determine what factors have been essential in creating a role. In addition, relevant actors such as other publishers, distributors, and retailers have been interviewed with the purpose of acquiring the complete picture of how the new publishers? can create a role within the industry.

The SMEs’ internationalization strategy—Foreign Market Entry Modes selection Title: 1st of June 2006 Date of the Seminar: Bus 809. Master thesis in international marketing Course: Han xiao Author: Ulf Elg, Associate professor, Lund University, Sweden Advisors: Ying Bin, Associate professor, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, China. Guest researcher, Lund University, Sweden Internationalization, entry mode, SMEs, foreign market Keywords: The purpose of this study is to understand the internationalization process of the SMEs, and try to define the motives and internal factors impact their foreign market entry mode selection. Thesis purpose: This thesis is based on qualitative method using case study. The primary information sources are the interviews with key-persons in internationalization process of SMEs Methodology: The literature review in this study concerns areas of SMEs’ motives for internationalization, foreign market entry mode approaches and influence of internal & external factors.

Lots of choices are to be made by a company who enters a new market with a new businessidea. Common questions that show up when a company is making it´s businessplan are how to target the market and how to use marketing as a tool to reach a specific customer or segment. It is difficult to know wether to target the market in different ways and what processes that can be used in the choice how to select the most potential and profitable customer. Another important question is how a company can positioning themself in a way so the customer will get a positive understanding of the company and what different positive abilities to mention in a possible businessproposal. This study is made on a small company in Sweden called AYEN Technology.

One of the areas in which current theory on entrepreneurship is ambiguous is in the explanation of how entrepreneurs act when entering a new market. One author that has attempted to contribute in this area is Saras D. Sarasvathy who has tried to explain the entrepreneurs reasoning through the theory of causation and effectuation. The former refers to a reasoning that takes the effect of an entrepreneurial action as given, while the latter looks upon the effects as uncertain, while only the means are given. With a foundation in this theory, Sarasvathy claims that when entrepreneurs enters a new market the level of environmental uncertainty is so high that reasoning based on causal relationships is rendered useless.

The aim of this master's thesis is to present an introduction to semiological analysis of web based material, which is a hypothesis that combines the theoretical framework of classical Saussurean semiology, visual social semiotics as was developed by Günther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, and Roland Barthes's notion of 'Myths'. Furthermore, a new tool called 'pseudo-signifier', constructed solely for the thesis, is also used in conjunction with the semiological analysis. The hypothesis is tested in a case study involving the web portal of a Swedish commune, Gothenburg (goteborg.se). A complete semiological analysis is performed on the case. The case study revealed numerous findings of interest, among others that images and texts on the web portal were sometimes used in a contradicting manner, and often in a way that symbollically excluded citizens from the portal, a fact which could be uncovered when studying underlying myths that permeated the web portal.