Background: Enterprises often refer to their employees as ?Our most valuable assets? in annual reports and other written statements. In reality, employees are seen as an expense rather than an asset in annual reports and the voluntary disclosure is often insufficient. Human capital disclosure has been discussed through decades and the latest topic in voluntary disclosure is called integrated reporting. Knowledge firms should disclose more about their employees than industrial companies due to the fact that the employees are a considerably more important asset to these types of enterprises.Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to study the disclosure of human capital, compare the disclosures between knowledge firms and industrial companies, and study the development of the human capital disclosures between the years 2003-2013.

The legal situation of companies costs for investing in computer software in an income tax law perspective is described by a tax law guidance that generelly acount these costs according the principles of research and development. If there is any reason to classify the costs differently, it could mean that immediate deduction not will be allowed. For this reason it is important to establish what the legal situation would be in a more nuanced tax law classification. The tax law categories that will be analysed in the thesis are research and development, inventories, Intangible assets, stocks and ongoing projects. The purpose of this thesis is mainly to give examples of what such an income tax law classification can look like.While dealing with the problems of classifying the costs some situations of competition will occure.

This thesis focuses on RM and customer relationships and tries to answer two research questions: how firms can retain customers and how to generate profitable customer relationships by using relationship marketing. We conducted case studies on JOB media, a company in Luleå, and Polardörren, a company in Öjebyn, Piteå. Our research has revealed that in many ways our case study companies conform in major ways to the theory in this particular area. However there are differences between how these two firms go about in regard to customer retention and establishing profitable customer relationship. We have discovered that JOB media, which is a service company is more inclined to maintaining close and long-term relationships with its customers.

The purpose of this thesis is to ascertain the main determinable factors of Swedish SMEs capital structure decisions and to investigate whether existing capital structure theories are applicable on Swedish SME financing. We have used panel data to run regressions of various capital structure determinants on three measures of capital structure; short- term debt, long-term debt and total debt. We found that growth opportunities, profitability and age are the most important capitalstructures determinants for our sample. Firm size shows a small explanatory result but the effective tax rate and the asset tangibility do not seem to explain the capital structure at all. Thematurity matching principle is considered significant..

Purpose: The purpose with this empirical study is to investigate how many companies have chosen to apply the K2 framework and see why the remaining companies have chosen not to.Methodology: A choice of a quantitative approach has been applied to collect information and create a foundation for the problem. Furthermore a qualitative approach has been selected to cover the remains.Theoretical perspective: This section contains a presentation of the agency theory, the institutional theory, the k-project and a comparison of K2 and the existing regulation.Results: Three out of 143 companies applies BFNAR 2008:1. 13 out of 143 companies use self-generated intangible fixed assets. Out of 29 contacted companies only three know about K2. The 29 companies are from various lines of business within an area.Conclusion: The conclusion of our research is that the majority of the companies did not reject to use the K2 regulations.

Given a considerable increase in knowledge-based companies, the interest for measuring and valuing Intangible assets, particularly human capital, has increased accordingly. Human capital has climbed the management research agenda as human assets make substantial contribution to the value creation in knowledge-based companies. Neither internal nor external financial statements reflect the value of an organization?s human assets. Against this backdrop, we find it interesting to explore how counting and controlling for human capital is devised.

Given a considerable increase in knowledge-based companies, the interest for measuring and valuing Intangible assets, particularly human capital, has increased accordingly. Human capital has climbed the management research agenda as human assets make substantial contribution to the value creation in knowledge-based companies. Neither internal nor external financial statements reflect the value of an organization?s human assets. Against this backdrop, we find it interesting to explore how counting and controlling for human capital is devised.

The purpose of the study is to highlight the issue of student loans securitization, and assure the importance and benefits that could be realized by performing such a transaction. The methodology is a case study for The National Board of Student Aid. It is a qualitative study, mainly using interviews, literature and scientific articles. By using this information we construct a securitization transaction structure ?CSN 2006-1?, and conduct a cost/benefit analysis.

Value-at-Risk (VaR) is among financial institutions a commonly used tool for measuring market risk. Several methods to calculate VaR exists and different implementations often results in different VaR forecasts. An interesting implementation is historical simulation, and the purpose of this thesis is to examine whether historical simulation with dynamic volatility updating is useful as a model to calculate VaR and how this differs in regard to type of asset or instrument. To carry out the investigation six different models are implemented, which then are tested for statistical accuracy through Christoffersens test. We find that incorporation of volatility updating into the historical simulation method in many cases improves the model.

Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) är den prissättningsmodell som mest frekvent används av aktörer på den finansiella marknaden samt i litteratur för att förklara sambandet mellan risk och förväntad avkastning. Teorin grundades under 1960-talet av William Sharpe och tidiga empiriska tester av modellen visade att den med hög förklaringsgrad kunde estimera en framtida förväntad avkastning givet en viss risknivå. På senare år har dock CAPM fått stark kritik eftersom nya empiriska undersökningar demonstrerat att modellen inte längre verkar visa en rättvisande avkastning i förhållande till risk.För att undersöka om den över 40 år gamla modellen fortfarande visar någorlunda rättvisande beskrivningar av verkligheten har vi ställt oss frågan: Går det att med hjälp av historiska data förutspå en riskfylld tillgångs avkastning på den svenska aktiemarknaden?Vid besvarade av denna fråga har studien syftet Att med hjälp av portföljer studera huruvida sambandet mellan risk och avkastning, vilket postuleras av CAPM, stämmer på den nutida svenska aktiemarknaden.Vi har utifrån vår kunskapssyn kritisk rationalism använt oss av en kvantitativ metod för att försöka ge svar på problemställningen, vilken angreps med ett deduktivt tillvägagångssätt. Den teoretiska referensramen behandlar teorier som portföljval, den effektiva marknadshypotesen och CAPM.

The thesis strives to answer the question whether there are any differences between how young customers, in comparison with older, are affected by brands when buying different products. The purpose is to get a clearer idea about the brands' importance in the future and in that way also to give guidance to companies about how to best market themselves and there products.To answer the question, an experiment was conducted with 480 respondents taking a survey where they had to rate a product after reading a short text about it. Some of the texts stated that a specific brand was behind the product while some said the product was produced by an unknown brand.The result of the study was that young people showed a greater propensity of rating products with a brand higher than products without brands, in comparison with the older respondents. This gives reason to believe that brands progressively will become an even more important tool for marketers and an unmatched asset for companies in the future..

Kravet på detta examensarbete var att utveckla tester för en produkt i prototypstadiet hos Ericsson i Katrineholm. Dessa tester ska framförallt användas som verktyg vid felsökning och utvecklas på kretskortsnivå. Detta innebär test för att hitta processrelaterade fel som t.ex. felaktiga lödningar. Arbetet började med att studera den tekniska bakgrunden.

This master's thesis sets out to explore information literacy in a contextualized learning environment with emphasis on students at a vocationally oriented program in the Swedish upper secondary school. The concept of information literacy is widely discussed and furthermore a common subject for research within the field of Library and Information Science. Information literacy can be described as a set of skills or a range of attributes defining an information literate person. The skills and/or attributes facilitating the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills are often linked to knowledge about computers and libraries.Another view on the concept of information literacy has been developed by the Australian researcher Annemaree Lloyd. She stresses the importance of social and physical information sources and that these also should be included in the development of information literacy.

This study examines implementation from national law in to local practice in the district of Kalmar to assure newly arrived immigrants orientation in civics. The study takes its starting point in Lipskys theory about street-level bureaucracy.  Questions that are discussed are about how  the education is understood by refugee?s coordinators, civic communicators and the new immigrates, how the organization has been and what role the demography and economic structures has played for the organization. It is a case study where interviews and enquete has been used.

In this thesis we focus on the issue of crowdfunding and especially how a project relates to and embraces its community. While a lot of related research focus on what makes people give, our research instead delve into whether a creator looks upon the sponsors as something more than just a financial resource. To manage this task we used a triangular perspective consisting of a case study, a questionnaire and a netnographic study. The goal was to gain the perspectives of creators, crowdfunding platforms and sponsors on how the communication between the community and the project works and can be improved.       The three crowdfunding platforms we reviewed (Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Rockethub) all had fairly similar models on how to attract sponsors and make them involved in the project, while the questionnaire and netnographic study demonstrated how a community could contribute in different ways.