Problem Discussion: Today the banks manage three central products: mutual funds, mortgages and bank accounts. Banks have authority and credibility, the services and the products they offer and sell can sometimes be difficult to understand. Customers are offered a large number of investment options with varying risk profiles. These developments have created an increasing need for knowledge and information among customers. The financial advice that the financial firms provides, remains a very important activity from a customer view.

Title: Co-operative, prevent or complement? - An essay on the relationships between control systems. Authors: Kim Eriksson and Victoria KarlssonPurpose: The essay aims to describe the relations between control systems and how they related to each other, based on an operationalization of the control systems. Research question: What are the control systems relations to each other? With regards whether control systems co-operative, prevents and/or complement each other.Theoretical framework: The essays theoretical framework is based on Malmi and Browns (2008) description of five different control systems and control mechanisms associated with each control system.   Research methodology: The method was based on three different data collection methods. These methods were observations, documentation, and semi-structured interviews.Conclusions: It is concluded that the control systems has comprehensive relations. Control systems have more, than one, relation to each other..

Today's high oil prices and more stringent environmental requirements have led to that manufacturers of mobile construction equipment try to make their products more energy efficient. With this in mind a project about hybridization of hydraulic systems has been formed. The purpose of this project was to analyze the savings that can be achieved by hybridization of hydraulic systems. A reach stacker truck (Kalmar DRD450-80S4XS) were simulated in some load cases with conventional hydraulic systems and with three types of hybridized hydraulic systems. Different parts of the hydraulic systems were also analyzed separately.

There are some key elements which distinguish a general operating system, such as Linux, from a Real Time operating system, such as OSE. The later belongs to the category of soft Real Time systems while Linux is a general operating system, with significantly improved real time properties after version 2.6. These improvements make it interesting to compare the two systems.When comparing two operating systems, there are a number of issues which have to be considered. One way to measure the performance of the systems is by studying the time consumption for the same functionality and hardware.During the study, the items that appeared as the most important for the performance of the systems, were: process primitives, system primitives, interprocess communication, context switches and interrupt latency.This work demonstrates that it is possible and reasonable to do performance testing on two different operating systems. The implemented tests cover a number of basic functionalities, which appeared to be the most crucial ones for the performance of the systems..

This paper aims to explore the relationship between financial risk and ESG scores in order to assist investors in making investment decisions. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a relationship between the ESG score of a company, and the financial risk in terms of volatility in the relevant company?s share price. The paper is grounded in sustainability reporting and financial risk. With the world facing significant changes and natural disasters, there is an urgent need for action to mitigate environmental impacts to avoid devastating consequences.

According to the current regulations described in IAS 27 - Consolidated and Separate Financial Statements, an investment company is required to consolidate all entities that it controls. However, this thesis outlines the creation of a new system, where those entities are instead measured at fair value, taking changes in fair value into account in the income statement. By recalculating the consolidated accounts for five major investment companies in accordance with the new system, this investigation concludes that the new system would provide investors with more relevant but less reliable accounting information. In addition, the historical financial performance of Investor, Industrivärden, Ratos, Kinnevik, and Lundbergföretagen, is evaluated using their recalculated consolidated financial statements. The evaluation indicates that the overall volatility in the companies' consolidated financial statements would have been higher during the time period 2005-2009, in comparison to official reports..

Year 1996 a new law was introduced in Sweden, the law of corporate restructuring, what purpose was to help companies in financial distress. Now, nine years later the procedure hasn?t been successful. This is what this thesis is trying to find out.This thesis main question is: What distinguishes the companies that have filed for a corporate restructuring, according to the financial position?The purpose of this thesis is to find out if key ratios can be used to distinguish the companies that filed for corporate restructuring.

This paper investigates how Swedish upper secondary school students relate to the financial support available from the Swedish state of education. It also looks at the attitudes of such students to the new CSN[1]truancy rules as they apply to school politics.Is there a difference in students? attitude to these truancy rules and does that difference depend on the students? socio-economic standard, whether they come from a wealthy background or a marginalised society or whether they are ethnic Swedish? Does this in any way affect the attitudes of the students?This financial support is only paid to those students who do not skip school. If they lose their right to this contribution because of truancy, their parents will also forfeit the right to the financial subsidies to which they may be entitled. Naturally, this may affect students in different ways, depending on what kind of financial situation their family is in.Do some students go to school out of their own financial interest or out of that of their parents? Through focus-group interviews, students have expressed their opinions, told about their experiences and stated their attitudes with regards to these matters.

The purpose of this study was to inquire how social workers perceive and describe financial abuse of older persons. Six qualitative interviews were carried out and the assembled data was then categorized and analyzed using a theory considering exercise of power and ageism as a theoretical frame. Previous research has shown that at least 10% of older persons have been exposed to some form of abuse or violence; however, there is a lack of research carried out in a Swedish context regarding financial abuse specifically. The six persons interviewed in this study all presented financial abuse as some kind of violence and as previous research has shown the study suggests that this is an increasing problem. Further research ought to be carried out to increase the awareness of this particular form of abuse and to facilitate discovery and development of measures to prevent financial abuse of older persons.

The concept of a Sharia compliant financial system has been a frequently discussed topic among scholars, bankers and media since the 1960th. It origins from the prohibition of interest, riba, which is stated in the Quran. Islamic banking is spread across the Muslim world and also exists in some western countries. This paper will try to create an image of what Islamic banking is in theory and in practice. This will be done by looking into the different methods of interest free banking, the Quran and the annual reports of four Islamic banks in different countries.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a genre of computerized systems which allows system development corporations to efficiently and more easily manage, maintain and handle the applications lifecycle. These ALM systems have a wide variety of tools which can be integrated to enable and support collaborative work, while they act at the core of the organisation. Todays ALM systems support flexible system development methods throughout the entire development process. This paper focuses on a case-study of a Swedish business- and technology corporation and their use of two ALM systems with an aim to unravel the differences between these systems and their functionality to serve as a basis for decision making regarding their utilization of best practice with their ALM-Systems. Meanwhile we studied their approach to ALM systems to see if they were using them according to the initial idea of ALM systems.

The concept of a Sharia compliant financial system has been a frequently discussed topic among scholars, bankers and media since the 1960th. It origins from the prohibition of interest, riba, which is stated in the Quran. Islamic banking is spread across the Muslim world and also exists in some western countries. This paper will try to create an image of what Islamic banking is in theory and in practice. This will be done by looking into the different methods of interest free banking, the Quran and the annual reports of four Islamic banks in different countries.

Purpose: To investigate if Altman´s Z´-score model, which calculates financial distress, can be applied on companies established in Sweden and if the financial crisis in 2008 made previously healthy companies go bankrupt.Methodology: Quantitative studies with a positivistic foundation. Empirical data will be collected in order to examine if there is generalizability among the studied objects. Conclusions will be made by comparing the empirical data with the theoretical foundation. Financial distress in firms will be measured.Theoretical perspectives: Altman´s Z´-score model, designed to predict financial distress in private firms.Empirical foundation: A selection of 93 private firms that have gone bankrupt in the years 2008, 2009 or 2010. The firms selected all have a turnover that exceeds 20 million SEK.

This paper analyses how Swedish fine-art oil paintings sold at auctions has performed as a monetary investment during the period autumn 1985 until spring 2006. An average price technique as well as a hedonic regression technique, applied to a sample of 19 213 auction sales, is used to construct price indices. The indices show somewhat different results, which is explained by the inability of the average price model to adjust for relative differences in quality between periods. The hedonic regression model on the other hand captures this effect, why the hedonic index is applied in a financial return model. By adjusting for transaction cost, the financial return of an average investment in paintings is calculated.

Municipalities must establish budget annually but they are free to decide how the governance should be designed, this can lead to lack of consistency and measurability within and between municipalities. The purpose of this thesis was to present a proposal for a unified and more measurable financial structure of a municipality where this was lacking. In our theory we describe the issues of traditional management control and we introduce an alternative control with non-financial ratios included, called the Balanced Scorecard. In the empirical data it is investigated how the governance of a municipality could be designed, according to the respondents. In the analysis the information gathered to reach the answers to what are considered to be useful governance in municipality, are examined. In the conclusion, we design Balanced Scorecards with both financial and non-financial ratios to the councils of the municipality..