Forecasting is an important part in attempting to predict how companies will perform in the future. The more accurate the prediction, the more valuable are the results obtained from the forecast. This thesis aims to investigate Forecasts of return on equity, and whether a disaggregation of the leverage formula into its underlying components affects the forecasting ability positively. This is conducted by comparing a model based on the leverage formula's components with a model solely based on return on equity from previous years. The study includes manufacturing companies on the Swedish Stock Exchange over the period 1998-2011.

The change in the information society has affected the development of the labour market for information specialists and informants as well as their roles. Companies are now aware of the fact that information specialists have a variety of important skills and competence that is important for them. The goal of this thesis is to see what defines an information specialist and an informant and also to find out their situation on the labour market. The similarities and differences between the two professions will also be discussed in the thesis. The main method used is the investigation of the job advertisements in the journal DIK-forum from the year 2000 and year 2004.

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.

An information system is something that evolves over time to enhance the company that is using it. The technology for building an information system is also evolving. New methods and new programming languages make system development easier. As new technology breaks ground and the demands of a company?s information system grow, the company will sooner or later get to a point where a change in the base of the system is necessary.

Today many sociologists speak about the modern world and the god and bad that it brings. In association to this discussion there is a tendency to speak about an increased individualization, a process that often also means more choices and possibilities. But in addition to this follows a big responsibility for how we choose to live our lives, since our choices not seldom also influences other people, both locally and globally. The aim of this essay is to investigate the importance of non-profit organizations with social direction in our Swedish welfare society and thereby also in a modern world where people's individual choices are becoming all more important. In order to answer my main issue I have implemented thirteen qualitative interviews, of which ten of the informers are from different non-profit organizations and three from different stately authorities.

A reforming trend is captured showing that countries are shifting from defined benefit pension systems towards defined contribution systems. The reforms have been justified through predictions that the defined benefit systems will not manage to provide good enough pensions to members in the future. The newer defined contribution pension plans often include individual financial accounts where individuals have the possibility to choose how a part of their pension savings should be invested. Sweden was early to introduce such a system, which at the moment provides more than 800 funds to choose from. The aim of this thesis is to capture the market risk associated with these individual investments and does so by using Monte Carlo simulations for six selected pension funds.

Forecasting stock market returns is an interesting topic since more and more Swedes enter and invest in this market. Theory implies, however, that such exercises should be impossible. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the possibility to forecast future stock returns by looking at macroeconomic variables? history. The study is limited to the Swedish market as it is based on the OMXS30-index which represents the 30 most exchanged stocks on Stockholms¬börsen, the Swedish stock exchange.

This MSc thesis is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the need for information from forest campartments selected for clear cutting, in connection with planning in an integrated forest- and sawmill enterprise. A review of literature is followed by a case stud y, where present conditions in a Swedish forest company are compared with current research in the area. The seeond part consists of a simulation stud y, which aims at camparing the accuracy of inventory estimates using different methods. The estimates are delivery Forecasts, covering one month consumptian of timber in a large sawmill.

Investors have been shown to be driven by emotional and psychological factors. This contradicts classical financial theories, for example the Efficient Market hypothesis which states that all investors act rationally. Behavioural Finance is an area of study which describes various psychological factors which may result in irrational investor behaviour.The primary question of the study is: which factors do operating people in the financial sector consider themselves to be influenced by? The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors which affect the process of creating Forecasts or making financial decisions. The study examines in addition if there is a correlation between length of investor experience and overconfidence in forecasting accuracy and investment decision making.The study includes both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

This thesis was made possible by the company Verendus system AB, which is the leading developer of dealership management systems in the caravan and camper market. The goal of the thesis was to create a statistics module for a new producer system envisioned by Verendus. The new system is aimed at manufacturers and importers of caravans and campers, with the goal of enabling its users to create more effective production lines. By providing statistical data to mentioned users they will be able to predict market trends and customize their production lines accordingly. Today such software does not exist which leads Verendus to think that its arrival would lead to a success on the market.Before the development and design of the producer system began, a new agile method had to be developed, MAM (Minimum Agile Method).

There exists a great need among companies and other organizations to be able to visualize statistics. It?s also increasingly common to ask for web-based solutions for increased flexibility and accessibility for users. This paper describes how large amounts of geovisual data, for a large number of regions, can be visualized in an interactive and well-presented manner. The paper let?s you walk through two application scenarios, developed in a Flash environment, using the GeoViz component library for visualization. The first application has been developed for Statistics Sweden (SCB), to give a solution on how to visualize statistics for Sweden?s zip code regions.

The future of the forest owners? associations are intimately coupled to the development in family forestry. Forecasts have been made that predicts that the number of forest properties for sale on the open market will increase as the interest among the children of the property owners is considered to decrease. The associations are also affected by continuing individualism in the society which may affect attitudes to as well as interest in membership. The objective of this study was to study the attitudes among grown-up children of members in a forest owners association towards overtaking the forest property as well as membership in a forest owners association.

A more complex and turbulent world market puts pressure on flexibility and the ability to adjust its business to the market changes. The rapid and unpredictable change is hade to analyze and forecast which demands more short-term forecasting. The issue for this dissertation is based upon the demand of more flexible ways of doing business in the bank sector in Sweden, which is a turbulent and unpredictable market. Handelsbanken is a company that uses the so called Beyond budgeting concept and the dissertation is about this company?s ability to solve the economic governance without the traditional budgeting process.

According to the immigration service Forecasts Sweden faces large refugee influxes in the coming years. This means that educators in the kindergarten, preschool and school, will meat children from the war torn countries. In this study, the purpose is to find out the educators different conceptions of war-affected refugee children, because my theory is that their beliefs influence their actions. I wanted to get answers to their beliefs about the difficulties or challengers that children and educators may be faced with. Furthermore, I wanted to know what educators envisioned about their own role?s importance to the war affected refugee children and their perceptions of the Swedish culture, environment, language and school.

In line with Sloan (1996) but on European data (STOXX 600) we are investigating whether stock prices reflect information about future earnings contained in the accrual and cash flow components. The extent to which current earnings performance persists into the future earnings performance is shown to depend on the relative magnitudes of the cash and accrual components of current earnings. Moreover, we still find a significant positive excess return (Jensen?s alpha and size-adjusted return) by replicating Sloans (1996) hedge portfolio by taking a long position in the stock of firms reporting relatively low levels of accruals and a short position in the stock of firms reporting relatively high levels of accruals. However, we find no evidence of negative excess returns for companies with relatively high accruals, this somewhat lower the total excess returns for all the portfolios.