The purpose of this masters thesis is to examine how managers in public libraries are managing financial cuts. Questions posed are: What strategies are used by the library manager to handle the cuts and how are the strategies being worked out? What are the consequences of the cuts? How do the managers use their library plans in the work with the cuts and how do the plans change as a consequence of the cuts? Library managers in eleven communities are interviewed about their financial cuts in 2003 and/or 2004. The result shows that cuts are made in different ways. The study analysed the managers statements with a model about strategies created by Oulton.

Blekinge Hospital suffers from a budget shortage of 100 million SEK, while the government now requires that hospitals will no longer be running a deficit. Blekinge Hospital will then use their limited resources to survive in the future and the activity must be enhanced in order to keep costs low without having to lay off personnel. The idea is that the organisation should be more efficient with a more efficient resource usage. Performance measurement systems are important tools for achieving the policies set out within an organization, measuring and evaluating performance is a way to see where improvements in efficiency may be necessary in the business. Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is one of several measuring systems, where the focus is on measuring non-financial performances.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the status of Swedish real estate companies in terms of financial health and risk of financial distress. The background is the ongoing financial crisis, which partly can be derived from the American real estate sector. Publicly available accounting information from 16 listed real estate companies has been analyzed for a period of one year using financial ratios covering both the operational and financial activities. We find that the deceleration in the economy and in the real estate sector have forced the real estate companies to make large write downs, in line with the relatively new accounting rules, IFRS. Write downs are likely to reoccur during the following periods and real estate companies will therefore probably be forced to continue to show negative results.

Prior research on the ability of financial ratios to predict bankruptcies has shown a significant difference between the companies that went into bankruptcy and those that survived. This paper investigates whether there is a difference in the prediction ability of financial ratios during the last financial crisis compared to relatively normal macroeconomic environments in which most previous studies have been conducted. We use univariate analysis to compare companies that went into bankruptcy during 2010 and 2011 with companies that remained active. Our dataset consists of 51 failed companies that are matched with 102 companies that remained active. All companies were Swedish limited companies with more than 50 employees and the comparison is made with 26 financial ratios.

As a consumer, you can use cards for payment more or less everywhere you go, however, it is not certain that the card can be used for all purchases. When a customer pays with card there arises a card transaction fee charged to the merchant. This is a big problem for businesses where transactions with small amounts are a large portion of sales. An observation at the beginning of this study showed that seemingly similar merchants have chosen to solve this problem in different ways. Some merchant?s refuses card purchases below a certain amount, while others accept card with any purchase.

Background: Previous studies focused on customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. But no studies focused on the interaction between the financial advisor and their client. Therefore we have chosen to focus on this knowledge gap.Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate how the interaction between financial advisors and customers affect financial advisory in investment decision making.Method: The thesis philosophy was positivistic because patterns were found with help of a survey. Furthermore is the paper quantitative since the thesis is measurable and it try to explain the interaction between the financial advisors and the clients demographic characteristics and how it influence the financial advice Conclusion: The theories thin-slicing and similarity attraction paradigm may not apply to the interaction between financial advisor and client..

Background: What is a share and what determines the value of a company? This is a constant issue that many in the financial world are facing. Many argue that there has been some decoupling between stock valuation and how the company in question is developing operationally after the financial crisis that the world faced during 2008-2009.Problem: It is important to distinguish between the company and the share. A company that is good and well maintained may not be worth buying only because of it. The share is judged by other elements also.

Introduction and background: The 1990s crisis and the global financial crisis year 2008 shows the same indications that the property market was affected negative. The Swedish Property companies had a difficult time on the market when the crisis led to decreased property trade and financing problems for the Property companies. The Swedish property companies became less attractive on the market and contributed to a drop in prices on investment property.Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to examine if there is any relation between the Swedish Property companies impairments on their investment property and the global financial crisis year 2008.Method: The essay is based on a quantitative study where we examined Swedish Property companies? annual reports. We answered our questions and our purpose from the empirical data that we collected from the annual reports.Conclusions: The study resulted in that we found a correlation between the Swedish Property companies? impairments on their investment properties and the global financial crisis year 2008.

This study investigated the performance and cost of scarification with a tractormounted excavator. Due to variations in terrain conditions the performance variedbetween 0.08 and 0.11 ha/E15h and, with a machine cost of 366 SEK/h, the cost ofscarification varied between 3 330 and 4 750 SEK/ha..

The purpose of this Bachelor Thesis is to investigate whether the introduction of IFRS, and in particular IAS 40 regarding fair value accounting of investment property, has lead to increased financial risk for Swedish real estate companies. Financial risk is measured using several financial risk ratios during the period 2000-2009, effectively covering the period before and after the introduction in 2005. The financial risk is found to actually have decreased significantly in comparison with the control group. The relative decrease supports the notion of a factor unique to the real estate companies at least partially driving the change, possibly IAS 40. However, this change is, due to the statistic method employed, only an indication of the direction of change, and consequently interpretations of the magnitude of change cannot be made.

During some time there has been a debate whether or not logging contractors? profitability can be considered poor. The contractors? situation is important for maintaining long term relationships and continuity in the forest industry. A thorough analytic picture is however missing.

Background: Performance measurement as a management control tool has received considerable academic attention. As the number of inter-organisational relationships, such as customer-supplier relationships, increases, there is a new scope for performance measurement as a management control tool. In order for a company to assess the effectiveness of its supplier relationships it has to define, measure and evaluate variables that are critical for the success of the relationship. The role of management control, and thereby of performance measurement, has increasingly been discussed in theory. However, empirical research in this area is still somewhat limited.

Hedge funds have the past few years become an increasingly popular investment alternative and in the last decade hedge fund assets managed have quadrupled to USD 2000 billion, a growth rate of around 25-30% per year. One explanation for this substantial increase is that hedge funds' minimum limits on capital invested has declined, which have made ??them available to retail investors. The recent turmoil in financial markets has also contributed to investors finding their way to hedge funds, whose goal is to generate stable returns regardless of how the market develops.Using Sharpe?s, Treynor?s and Jensen's performance measures, I have investigated whether hedge funds manage to generate higher risk-adjusted returns than traditional managed funds.

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..

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.