This study examines whether the ownership structure of Swedish firms contributes to explain the variations in executive pay. A regression analysis was performed on 102 companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The analysis suggests a negative relationship between ownership structure and executive pay after taking company profitability and size into account. The result is in line with previous studies and the agency theory. This indicates that large shareholders have a stronger position in Swedish companies or that large shareholders monitor the management to a larger extent, rather than providing incentives.

This study deals with teachers ideas about the physical environment of a mobile preschool and how it affects children?s learning. The essay describes how the preschool bus is decorated and how a normal day works in the mobile bus. The survey was based on the following questions:Are there disadvantages and advantages in terms of physical environment in the mobile preschool from an educator based perspective?What are the teacher?s thoughts about the impact on children?s learning in terms of the physical environment on the bus?Summary: To answer my questions I have participated in activities during the day and I have used the interviews to find out the teachers thoughts.

This master thesis is looking into the stories on the internet forum www.resedagboken.se. The stories of Swedish teenaged exchange students in the U.S. are studied and the main purpose is to see both what they are writing about and the reason for why they are spending their time writing down their experiences in a public forum.Even though most of the teenagers here are writing with a specific audience in mind, all the stories are free to anyone to take part of and this causes a difficult position for the teenagers who often seem to forget the public point of view when they are telling about their personal lives.The study is divided into two parts. The first one looks into the content of the stories and the other one focuses on the storytellers and their reasons for writing. The teenagers are writing both a lot about their everyday lives in their new environment, but also a lot of things to keep in touch with what their friends and family in Sweden are doing.

Social enterprises make up one of the groups of participants that provide welfare services financed by public funding. The object of this study is to describe and analyze from a theoretical point of view which conditions, in what fields, by which division of responsibility and finally through what decisions these social enterprises are allocated a place in the market for social welfare services. The company that has been the object of study offers services in the field of social welfare and in employment. In the study a triangulation of qualitative methods has been used: studies of literature on the subject, recurrent interviews and observations and also reviews of documents. The results have been analyzed from theories on the space available on the market for social services, on social economy and on social capital in the form of strong, weak and bridging bonds.

Pairs trading is a relatively new trading strategy, the strategy has only been used during a couple of decades. A study made on the American stock market has shown that the strat-egy has generated a positive result. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate if pairs trad-ing has been able to create a positive result on the Swedish stock market during the time period of 1995-2004.The data required for this thesis was collected from Stockholm stock exchange and is ad-justed for splits and issues.The pairs trading strategy involves two stages ? identification of pairs and trading signals. The pairs were identified during a period of 12 months.

Purpose: Our aim is to get an insight on how home care workers experience, handle and looks upon their work. We also want to form an opinion of how home care workers experience the relationship to the clients they meet.Questions: How does home care workers experience their daily work with their clients? Home care workers daily meet many different sorts of clients with different needs, how do they handle this? What kind of support does home care workers get in their work?Method: A qualitative design with semistructured interviews.Conclusion: The most central conclusion from all of our interviews were: that home care service workers has a very stressful and demanding occupation, that the work has a low status, that the personnel has a big responsibility for the wellbeing of other people and that they often find their work satisfying and fun. To have someone to talk to and exchange ideas with was also mentioned by the informants as a vital part of feeling support in their work. From the Antonovskys theory, a sense of coherence, and Goffmans views of the society, we also find that the larger part of our informants feel a high sense of coherence and that when they have to adjust to their different caretakers they play different roles..

The main purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of information needs of eight vocational studies teachers at the Handicraft Programme at a senior high school. I have analyzed the teachers? needs of information and the empirical material has been collected through interviews with eight vocational studies teachers. To analyze the interviews I have used Lars Höglund and Olle Persson?s model for information needs and a model for information sources.

ABSTRACTIn this study, five people were interviewed who are involved in a drug-assisted program for opiate addiction, also called substitution program. The meaning of substitution is that these clients' drug addiction is replaced with substitute preparations, either methadone or Subutex in an orderly manner. The clients of the researcher decided to study the substitution program have all been a heavy opiate addiction for years. Their participation in the replacement program is more than two years, and those who have been around the longest have been in the program for six years, so long as the substitution program has existed in Visby.This is a qualitative study in which interviews are conducted face to face with each individual client, and the interview was unstructured in the sense that no specific issues made in advance. The interviews have been themed, and the researcher has gone through various areas of life around the respondent.

Some researchers claim that we are witnessing the advancement of becoming a network society, and in spite of the different problems associated with the network form of organization, many cities still choose to engage in different types of networks. On account of that the aim of the study is to examine which expectations Swedish member cities of the network Eurotowns might have, and if their actions in the initial period of engagement in Eurotowns mainly could be explained by ?Logic of Consequentiality? or ?Logic of Appropriateness?.A qualitative research method was used and a major part of the empirical material consists of the information given by the interviewees.Regarding the expectations Swedish member cities have on Eurotowns, the result showed that five main areas could be identified mutual resource exchange, activities, breadth, security and meeting place. The results also showed that the actions of Swedish member cities may vary between ?Logic of Consequentiality?, ?Logic of Appropriateness? or a combination of the both logics.Furthermore the study also provides empirical evidence supporting the previously theoretical criticism expressed regarding the central assumption that the strategic actions of an actor can be regarded as a direct consequence of the mutual resource dependency..

The Swedish teacher education is continuously changing along with the understanding of learning. The teacher education at Södertörn University has an intercultural profile, which is considered modern and innovative. In this essay, students? experiences from their practical training are analyzed to examine the correspondence between teacher practice and the modern teacher role conveyed by the University. The results show that some students have experienced practical training where the standards of the University?s teacher role were met, whereas others feel that they have not received the practical guidance needed to be able to wholly use their education in their future employment.

The specified purpose was, based on gender, age and type of employment, study the employees motivation to participate in health projects and their reason to maintain exercise habits after the termination of the health projects. Exercise frequency was studied in relation to the other background variables. A revised version of the questionnaire Motivation for Maintenance of Exercise Habits (Josefsson, 2005) was distributed at Albany International, Halmstad. The most frequent cause to exercise was ?enhance my condition?.

 Abstract The purpose with this study is to study the individual setting of salary rates among branch heads. We have chosen to look deeper into which criteria that are the base for the branch heads? individual setting of wage rates within geriatric care and the care of disabled people. One other aspect we have looked into is how the setting of salary rates appears from a gender perspective. The empirical material in our thesis consists of both qualitative and quantitative methods in the shape of a questionnaire study and three open interviews.

In this paper we examine what security is to the individual and how the individual creates and maintains security in their work. The purpose of this paper is to study how the creating of security in working life is performed. We conduct six semi-structured qualitative interviews with permanent employees in the private sector and we encode our material using thematic analysis. We analyze our material and illustrate our problem area on the basis of Anthony Giddens's theory of ontological security and give examples of how security and creating of security is performed at the empirical field with previous studies in the research area. Our survey shows that security for the individual at work seems to be about having continuity in everyday life, financial stability, a permanent employment, a challenging and fun job and a family in good health and good living.

This essay is an evaluation of the act of establishment (2010:197). The act is about different operators' responsibility and accountability for new arrivals to get a more effective integration into society and to speed up the new arrivals' establishment on the labor market. The purpose of this act is to get more new arrivals involved in the Swedish labor market directly. By doing so, it gives these people a possibility to become self-sufficient. This study has focus in four different operators; Employment service, Immigration service and two local politicians from Social democrats (Socialdemokraterna) and Conservatives (Moderaterna).

This thesis explores some issues regarding estimations of the cost of capital on the Stockholm Stock Exchange through reverse engineering of the Residual Income Valuation model and through usage of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. Previous studies are in conflict of whether the risk premium changes considerably over time or not. Furthermore, the risk premium estimated by CAPM tends to be fairly stable. In this study, reverse engineering of the cost of capital implied by analysts? forecasts shows a significant difference in the risk premium over time.