Livestock animals affect their environment in a number of different ways, mostly through grazing and trampling. This study focused on the effects of Gotland pony grazing on forest structure and diversity, and the impact on ground cover. To compare the fenced and grazed area with a reference area outside the enclosure a number of transects were used. The study showed that there was no significant difference in height structure and diversity between the compared sites; however, there were a significantly higher proportion of damaged trees inside the enclosure. The ground cover variables showed a higher amount of bare soil, plant litter and wood-rush (Luzula sp.) inside the enclosure whilst grass was more frequent in the reference area.

The function of budgetary controls is to control the resource allocation within companies. It can also be an instrument for measure and control subordinates and/or business units? performance (Van der Stede 2001). This paper concerns the latter; when the budgetary control function is used to measure and control subordinates performance based on budget. Previous research in this area has not yet accomplished to explain the effects of tight budgetary control which Hartman (2000) considers as the main issue to be concerned about in management accounting research.Previous research has presented contradictory findings regarding tight budgetary control explained by positive effects as well as negative effects during the last decades.

What role does the state play in economic development? This thesis seeks to investigate the relationship between a strong state and economic development. To define the concept of a strong state I focus on the relationship between the scope of state functions and the efficiency of which these functions are implemented. The concept of a strong state is in this thesis defined as the efficiency of the state functions. By using a database constructed by three economists; David Kaufman, Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi as a measurement of a strong state I test the relationship with economic development empirically.

Background and problem: The importance of banks was clearly shown during the last financial crises, when the crises that started in the banking sector spread to the rest of the world. This is one of the reasons that this thesis is focused on banks in particular, one other reason is that a lot of previous studies has chosen to exclude banks because of the fact that their balance sheet differ from non-financial companies. This thesis is a beginning in filling in the gap that exists in the knowledge of banks capital structure. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to prove that it is possible to explain the capital structure in banks and that differences in the capital structure of the banks in Great Britain, Sweden and the United states of America exists. Method: The fact that our study is partly a replication of two earlier studies made a deductive approach most appropriate.

Previous research in the field of consumer marketing has confirmed the positive effects of divergence on advertising efficiency. Despite the coherent evidence, some industries lag in the adoption of these findings, one of which is the Swedish real estate market. Divergence has not been elaborately investigated within said context and this paper addresses the need of actionable insights for housing advertising. Starting with the proven success of housing firm Fantastic Frank who work with detail photos in contrast to the common wide angle, this paper examines theoretical implications of detail photos' characteristics. Besides being divergent, detail photos are also ambiguous which renders access to effects related to visual perception.

The aim of this study is to analyze the process of an agenda setting and see how a specific issue came to materialize on the security policy agenda. The empirical goal of the study is to see why Sweden chose to participate in the EU-led operation to Chad, and how that process came to be? The analysis is based upon Kingdon's multiple streams theory (2003) where he distinguishes the process into three streams. Central for his theory is the coupling of these streams and the importance of a policy entrepreneur. I complement Kingdon's theory of policy entrepreneurs by taking inspiration from Hinnfors (1995), Gustavsson (1999) and especially Eriksson (2000) and their analysis of policy change and agenda setting.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between physical activity and perceived stress, energy and musculoskeletal disorders among office-workers and warehouse-workers and also to see if there were any differences depending on work-place and gender. The method that was used to collect data was three different validated questionnaires that measured stress and energy (the Stress-Energy questionnaire), musculoskeletal disorders (intensity and localization of pain, a Pain Drawing questionnaire with a VAS-scale) and physical activity (IPAQ ? the short version). Eighty-eight workers participated in the study. Forty-seven of them were office-workers and forty-one were warehouse-workers.

This study investigates whether the permanent measurement bias (PMB) has changed over time for Swedish companies listed on the Stockholm Stock exchange at least one year during 1996-2000 or 2005-2010. By using the Residual Income Valuation-model the markets' implicit value on PMB is generated through reversed engineering, as values for all variables except PMB are entered such as the market perceived them at the specific valuation date each year. This implicit value is classified into industries and then sorted by their median. Statistical tests are performed to see if there is a difference between the industry median and the accounting-based values on PMB. The difference from period one to period two is also statistically tested for.The study finds that the implicit values on PMB have changed somewhat between the periods; however the fluctuations are not statistically significant.

The purpose of this thesis is to gain a holistic understanding of who are the consumers of fortified health food products; moreover to highlight what are the characteristics of the consumers who are likely to purchase these products. This thesis employed a quantitative strategy with an inductive and a grounded theory approach. The data was collected from a research company. Existing theories in the area of functional food were not possible to find. Considering that the area is new this seems plausible; however, previous studies provided insight for substantive framework.

During the time of membership in The European Union Swedish domestic policy has gone through many changes. A lot more political areas are being influenced by the EU policy. Today every ministry has got some sort of EU office. Swedish politicians are functioning on two arenas, domestic and European. At the same time Swedish membership has gone from being highly discussed to being a state of normality.

The purpose with this paper is to examine if tertiary education and democracy have an impact on economic growth. In order to decide how democratic the examined countries are the democracy index constructed by The Economist is used. Besides the two central theories the purpose is also to explain why these variables could affect growth and to examine direct and indirect effects. Indirect effects mean that one variable affects another variable which thereafter has an impact on economic growth.34 OECD countries are compared in order to investigate whether education and democracy are strongly correlated with BNP per capita. Therefore a statistical design is used as method.The empirical results suggest that there is significant correlation between democracy and economic growth.

The purpose with this paper is to examine if tertiary education and democracy have an impact on economic growth. In order to decide how democratic the examined countries are the democracy index constructed by The Economist is used. Besides the two central theories the purpose is also to explain why these variables could affect growth and to examine direct and indirect effects. Indirect effects mean that one variable affects another variable which thereafter has an impact on economic growth.34 OECD countries are compared in order to investigate whether education and democracy are strongly correlated with BNP per capita. Therefore a statistical design is used as method.The empirical results suggest that there is significant correlation between democracy and economic growth.

Background: The statutory audit in Sweden was implemented in 1983 and the purpose was to improve the owners ability to control and to mitigate economic fraud. The present debate is concentrated about the high costs of audit in small companies. The major concern is whether the statutory audit should be mandatory for the smallest companies. Purpose: The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to explain the value of auditing in small companies defined as 10/24-companies by identify and analyze possible factors that affects the attitudes towards auditing and reflects the value of a statutory audit. Research method: Our study is deductive and based on a quantitative research method which includes both a survey and the companies annual reports.

The specified purpose was, based on gender, age and type of employment, study the employees motivation to participate in health projects and their reason to maintain exercise habits after the termination of the health projects. Exercise frequency was studied in relation to the other background variables. A revised version of the questionnaire Motivation for Maintenance of Exercise Habits (Josefsson, 2005) was distributed at Albany International, Halmstad. The most frequent cause to exercise was ?enhance my condition?.

It is important that the language in textbooks for foreign language learners reflects the language that the learners would encounter in real life. For this reason, the presence of the thousand most common nouns in two Swedish textbooks in Spanish for upper secondary school is observed in this study. Furthermore, this study aims to examine how these nouns occur in order to determine if their pattern of occurence favours the learning and consolidation of words. The main materials that have been used are A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish by Davies (2006) and the word search program available in the digital versions of the textbooks. The results show that the presence of the thousand most common Spanish nouns does reflect the frequency information presented in the frequency dictionary but not all thousand nouns are included.