The project was performed in collaboration with Husqvarna, one of the world?s leading manufacturer in the market of electric outdoor products. The report is a thesis work of a bachelor mechanical engineer program, in the field product development and design.The project is a study of the development opportunities within drive belt for a gear driven gearbox to one of Husqvarnas petrol powered hedge trimmers. A big part of the project was also to find combinations of materials for all components in the gearbox, to reduce weight and maintain or improve the performance of the system. Belt drive was of interest to investigate as an alternative solution to the current design that can reduce wear on the system at a performance test performed in the company before the product is released to market.

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..

Syftet med studien var att skapa en bättre förståelse för hur några juniorishockeyspelare och deras tränare ser på hur faktorerna lagsammanhållning, spelaromsättning, roller och prestation förhåller sig till varandra och hur de arbetade med dessa faktorer. Instrumenten som användes var GEQ (Group Environment Questionnaire) och två helstrukturerade intervjuguider. Deltagarna i studien var ishockeyspelarna i ett J18-lag (n=18) och deras tränare (n=1) i en medelstor klubb i Sverige. Resultatet visade att samtliga intervjudeltagare upplevde ett positivt samband mellan lagsammanhållning, spelaromsättning, rollklarhet och prestation. Sambandet beskrevs dock som cirkulärt, att alla faktorerna var beroende av varandra och påverkades av varandra.

In the last couple of decades, corporate law firms have rapidly grown to become both influential and highly profitable corporations in the business world. Today, the largest law firms are assumed to bear far greater resemblance to large and often multinational public limited companies than the small businesses generally associated with legal services. However, one interesting specific set them apart from the majority of other companies; the partnership and its interrelated profit sharing. The aim of this study has therefore been to investigate partner compensation systems in corporate law firms and further examine what implications chosen compensation systems have on the organizations. Using a multiple case study, including 7 of Scandinavia?s largest and most well known law firms, the results show that partner compensation systems are highly individual and the critical question is whether to employ seniority based or performance based compensation systems.

The DuPont formula is one of the most well known and basic tools used for financial statement analysis and is highly useful for understanding firms strategies and operating environment. Previous studies on American listed companies have also shown that analysis of the changes in the DuPont components is useful in forecasting contexts. In this thesis we test whether disaggregating the change in return on net operating assets provides incremental information about future performance for Swedish listed and not listed companies. We find that the change in asset turnover is a leading indicator of increased profitability for both listed and private companies, regardless of size. We also find evidence that the usefulness of the disaggregation for understanding future performance is greater in capital intense industries and lesser in service industries..

The actual project presents the development of a testing rig for a steam engine. A short overviewabout the development of steam engines is presented, until arriving to the development of thepresent engine, which will require to be tested in different ways.The testing rig studied on this project (based on a Lanchester engine) will be used to testdifferent materials and layouts for the group Piston-Cylinder.The engine is a high performance steam power engine, which is going to have a highpower/dimensions ratio, what will lead to require high performance components and materials.An introduction to the testing rig is presented, and the entire design project is done in order toreplace the disappeared documentation of the current testing rig, built on the 1970?s. Also somemodifications done in the original testing rig are presented, as well as some detected problemsand their possible solutions..

Organizational learning has become more and more important in the last decades as the environment in which organizations exist continues to change rapidly and unexpectedly. In order for organizational learning to happen, the individuals within the organization must learn. Just as different individuals possess different skills, each individual also has their own learning style. As the use of teamwork increases, so does the need for techniques to put high performing teams together and with organizational learning as one of the objectives the question is, how do we maximize learning, efficiency and performance in teams? This study uses a quantitative method to examine how teams, from a course at the Stockholm School of Economics, perform on the individual learning, team efficiency and team performance scale based on the individual learning styles within the team.

This paper presents a study that evaluates the performance of stock recommendations issued on Swedish stocks during 2003. The selection of recommendations in this paper originates from banks, major brokerage firms and financial press located in Sweden. The total of 171 recommendations consisted of 99 buy recommendations and 72 sell recommendations. Forecast revisions presented in this paper suggest that Investment managers have no ability to predict performance winners, nor do their forecasts in general have any significant impact on stock prices. A mere 50 percent of the recommendations in this revision had a weak ability to outperform their benchmark indexes as in other similar revisions.

Under de senaste decennierna har ett flertal stora förändringar skett som förändrat förutsättningarna för handel mellan länder. För att skapa tillväxt i dagens globala ekonomi behövs internationalisering av företag. Historiskt sett har det framförallt varit stora multinationella firmor som burit ansvaret för internationell handel, men internationaliseringen av småföretag har ökat markant på senare år och ådragit sig intresse från forskningen. Internationalisering av småföretag kan innebära fördelar för ett lands ekonomi, såsom för företaget självt. Entreprenörens roll är avgörande för ett företags internationella strategi och för förståelsen av företagets internationella agerande.

Som en följd utav den växande efterfrågan för importerade livsmedel i Kina, finns det idag ett par svenska livsmedelsföretag som exporterar svenska livsmedel till Kina. Den ständigt växande ekonomin i Kina har skapat nya konsumentbehov och öppnat nya möjligheter för utländska företag att sälja sina inhemska produkter till landet med en enormt växande marknad.Enligt en färsk amerikansk rapport har den ekonomiska tillväxten i Kina bidragit till en växande medelsklass som efterfrågar säkrare och naturligare kvalitets produkter. I rapporten framgår att med en växande medelklass i landet har människor blivit mer måna om att köpa utländska livsmedel. Detta pga. ett antal tidigare livsmedelsskandaler, som orsakat förödande konsekvenser för befolkningen.

År 2008 hamnade världen i kris till följd av omfattande utlåning i USA. Krisen spred sig vidare till Europa och den europeiska krisen har kommit att kallas statsskuldskrisen. Flertalet europeiska länder har högre skulder än de kan hantera och riskerar konkurs. Dessa länder kämpar med sin ekonomi vilket har en negativ effekt på euron och har spridit en oro till övriga länder i Europa. Vid oroligheter, speciellt lågkonjunktur, minskar importen och följaktligen exporten inom Europa. Sverige är ett exportberoende land, exporten står för hälften av BNP varav 40 % går till Europa. Genom Sveriges beroendeställning vill vi beskriva hur företag med betydande export till Europa har agerat på den osäkra marknaden.

In this essay I analyze the performative aspects relating to Marina Abramovi?'s The Artist Is Present, which took place in spring 2010 at MoMA in New York, from the context of the artist and work, institution and documentation. In this performance work, for the duration of the exhibition, Abramovi? sits completely still opposite another chair where anyone from the audience may sit. The art arises through this participation.

In this master thesis outage statistics covering tree years from two distribution grids are analyzed with the purpose to deduce which factors yield outages. The statistics are extensive therefore allowing in-depth analysis of both customer and system related factors. From this starting point and as a model of explanation energy not supplied is studied as the consequence and the measurement of the inconvenience caused by outages. Different methods for calculating energy not supplied are developed and studied and put in comparison to the method used in Network Performance Assessment Model, which is the Swedish frame work for regulating electricity distribution.Analysis of the outage statistics show a relation between the type category of customer and outages that can be deduced to the variance and the density associated with that customer category. Prioritization of different customer categories is elevated also in this aspect.

At night, the visibility is reduced and the demands on the driver increase. A safety system that enables the driver to discover warmer objects in the surroundings when the visibility are reduced, such as the Vision Enhancement System (VES) contributes to safer night-time driving. Since the benefits of this system are established, it is of interest to investigate different design aspects. The VES display has in earlier studies been positioned in front of the driver but different display positions such as peripheral placement should be evaluated. The present simulator study is an investigation of the effects of different display positions inside the car.

This thesis discusses main problems associated with dictionary-based Cross-Language Information Retrieval as lexical and translational ambiguity of query terms, translation of compounds and phrases, dictionary limitation. The purpose of the study is to investigate how query structure influences the effectiveness of CLIR regarding performance of three query types: original query, unstructured query and structured query. Query structuring refers to the application of #syn-operator to group query terms. The study comprises an experiment that was performed in the InQuery IR system with TrecUta database that contains 550,000 news articles from different American newspapers. 24 topics were used for the experiment.