The purpose of this essay is to identify the costs of illness in different organizations, and compare the calculated result with the actual result in their annual reports.We collected information thru interviews with the personnel manager in the selected organizations, and used the annual reports to add necessary information.When we applied our model, we found that the selected organizations, in some cases, have a cost of illnes which is up to seven times higher than shown in their annual reports. It?s, in general, the costs that aren?t related to the salary (additional costs), which are much higher than shown.The absence of a model that calculates the costs of illnes can result in wrongful decisions. If a model would be applied in an organization, it should increase the awearness of the actual costs of illnes, which can lead to better decisions througout the whole organization.This report is written in Swedish..

Starting in January 2007, capital adequacy of internationally active banks will be regulated by the new Basel Capital Accord, International Convergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standards ? a revised framework, [Basel II]. The framework introduces for the first time minimum capital requirements for operational risk and encourages market discipline of capital adequacy by initiating requirements for public disclosure of quantitative and qualitative information on operational risk exposure. This thesis examines the nature, definition, management and public disclosure of operational risk in Scandinavian banks based on regulations and recommendations presented in Basel II. We find that the models currently available for addition of operational risk to the capital requirement do not reflect actual operational risk exposure of banks.

In order to facilitate trade between EU members, the European Committee has created regulations that will govern supervision of organic products. Every regulatory agency shall, according to the European Committees regulations, carry out a risk classification of each organic producer they regulate. This study for The National Food Administration compares regulation of Swedish organic products with other countries, and aims to produce a simplified model based on risk that can be the beginning of the risk classification model that Sweden in the current situation don?t have. The thesis is based on three questions: 1) What criteria should we use for assigning organic food producers? 2) How do selected European countries and frontrunners rate organic producers and what can Sweden learn from them? 3) How might a national classification model of organic production look in order to ensure an equivalent level of regulation and prevent competition among private inspection bodies? A review of information gathered from the different countries gave differing results.

Today there are many different Cad-applications on the market for engineers. Because of big building projects it has become more and more important to work with the same application or to have access to a neutral file type to be able to transfer files between different ones.This report studies the single objects and how they react when transferring them between ADT and ArchiCAD via the neutral type IFC. We have also been looking at problems during the transfer between and if there are some connections between these problems. Afterwards we created a neutral object model of a small country house to see if the objects appeared different. The result shows no differences.But looking at the problems that appeared during the transmissions they felt small and no logical.Today it is not possible to save in a neutral type without facing small problems.

The Forthcoming Essay concerns the publicly protected employment (Offentligt skyddad anställning), it's content and what actually happens to its participants after they have retrieved it. We have also, during our research, discovered a great lack of background research concerning this subject. Beside statistics and publicly protected employment rulework there only exist a small amount of research. This is mainly focused on people with physical function disorders and socialmedicial function.Of that we believe there is an urgent need to undertake more research in this unexplored sector of the labour market. Our purpose with this essay was to examine what happened to publicly protected employment -participants after they had undergone the process.- In what ways has the participation in publicly protected employment altered their possibilities on the labour market?- What happens to the participants when they after the participation in publicly protected employment as judged qualified not for the labour market?In this essay we have chosen a qualitative method as an approach, mainly because we consider our material as being qualitative in its character.

Over the last decade, the private insurance market has undergone a stable growth in turnover and growing demand for insurance products in all Member States of the European Union. Therefore, the creation of a single market in insurance will enable consumers to have access to wider choice of insurance products, and insurance companies to gain access to markets in various Member States and compete effectively. The EU legal framework for the insurance industry embraces the Treaty freedoms of services, establishment and capital, the EC Directives and the ECJ case-law. The present thesis identifies numerous factors that hinder the Community insurance market integration and offers possible remedies. The summary of the market obstacles is all-inclusive and reflects the responses to the questionnaires and the Commission surveys.

Too much attention has been given to mainstream approaches in performance management and management accounting research, without taking in to account changes in the environment with the rapid growth of online retailing. This paper evaluates how and/or if performance management differs in online contexts by using a conceptual model developed by Ferreira et al (2009). The model and its components are tested on three multichannel- and six e-commerce businesses. The result and its analysis is commented on by two e - commerce experts. The result shows that the operation method of the models twelve components do not differ in terms of work methods in online and offline contexts.

Genom litteraturstudier samt praktiskt arbete med förbättringar av programvaran File Secure har ett antal lämpliga designmönster för konfigurationshantering i Java identifierats och applicerats. Den typ av konfigurationshantering som här avses innefattar inläsning från en databas till en objektrepresentation, samt ett grafiskt gränssnitt som låter användaren modifiera datat. Det antas att mängden data är förhållandevis liten, vilket har gett upphov till vissa förenklingar. Resultatet av arbetet presenteras i form av ett mönsterspråk för konfigurationshantering, innefattande designmönstren Domain Model, Active Record och det befintliga mönsterspråket Model - View - Controller. Detta kan appliceras i många olika sorters system..

Developed model for easier animal welfare assessment- with examples from dairy cows in loose housingAnimals in captivity are completely dependent on human care. If captive animals are prevented from exhibiting their natural behavior, they may suffer. Animal welfare inspectors, who insure that the animal welfare legislation is followed, use a checklist to assess the situation in the husbandry. This checklist contains only two levels of assessment, which may result in a lack of detail in the assessment of the husbandry. The objective of this report was to develop a more detailed model that provides an overview of the situation in husbandry.

Due to the forest industry downsizing, many communities in rural forest regions in Canada and Sweden are facing problems to survive. In order to create community sustainability, resilience and well-being in remote forest regions, the view on the forest resources has shifted towards multiple use, through the concept of sustainable forest management (SFM). Beside the economic and ecological elements of sustainability, the social forest values are needed, contributing to the human well-being, local participation, stakeholder collaboration, human rights and cultural connection. In this thesis the embodiment of the social component of SFM within Prince Albert Model Forest (Canada), and Vilhelmina Model Forest (Sweden) will be examined. Being partners and facing similar challenges as rural boreal forest regions, the two model forests are compared through analysis of projects and activities, conducted interviews and organization documents. Looking at projects mentioned as successful by the interviewees, they all have elements from the social values of SFM. The direction can be explained by the introduction of the Forest Communities Program in Canada, demanding the Model Forests to work towards community stability and resilience, the Model Forest organization concept itself and the way global focus are increasing around social forest values. In the future, it may be important that the role of the MFs enable some kind of political authorization and legitimacy in order to improve conflict solving and indigenous rights equality.

Making accurate predictions of private consumption expenditures is a difficult task. This thesis examines if consumer confidence can be used to forecast consumption. Using regression analysis, the link between consumer confidence and private consumption expenditures is analyzed for Sweden between the years 1994 and 2005. Two different models are estimated. In the first model consumption is regressed only on consumer confidence, while model two is extended to contain more variables.

During the past few years a vast amount of research has been done to increase the understanding of the complex ecosystem of the Baltic Sea. Modelling and simulations are important tools to increase knowledge of the system. A suitable model must be simple to use and the parameters and variables needed in the model must be easy to access.In this paper a dynamical mass-balance model, CoastMab, which is validated for smaller coastal areas, has been used to predict concentrations and transports of phosphorus in three large coastal areas - the Gulf of Finland, the Gulf of Gdansk and the Gulf of Riga. CoastMab uses ordinary differential equations to regulate inflow, outflow and internal flows. To reflect seasonal variations in temperature and different types of flows the model has a temporal resolution of a month.

In the current situation in the housing market and in particular the inner city much attention is directed towards achieved prices per square meter in sales. The indicator is as a principle an appropriate measure of the housing market?s health and development, and can to some extent be used to make approximations of the general economic health status of municipalities and counties. It occurs occasionally that questions about whether prices are based on fundamentals at all times.The thesis questions that very issue, not from a macro accompanying financial perspective but rather from a microeconomic perspective, where each tenant ownership in the study is a micro-object. Are the observed prices per square meter rational relative to housing cooperative?s assets or is there a lack in the observed prices anchoring the respective association's finances.

A study was performed to evaluate whether established methods of analysis of protein content in barley (Kjeldahl, Dumas, or NIT (short for Near Infrared Transmittance)) gives different results for wet and dried barley. This was carried out because there are concerns regarding the well-worn NIT prediction model giving different results for these conditions and that such an error causes significant price fluctuations on the market. By performing analyses of samples, both before and after drying, of the three different barley varieties Tipple, Prestige, and Quench, with all the techniques, data was obtained that could be analyzed statistically. The study showed that the NIT prediction model gives results for wet barley that is about 0.29 percentage points higher compared to dried barley. This difference was also statistically significant when a t-test was performed.

This paper studies the option market?s implied dividend as a predictor of future equity market returns. We introduce this variable in the simple total return framework and discuss some complications of using it as a proxy for the expected dividend. We construct some regressions using the price-dividend ratio and the implied dividend growth, and test them on six years worth of data on the EURO STOXX 50-index. The main result is that implied dividend growth exhibits some forecastability over two-year horizons, but that the dataset is too short to draw any definitive conclusions about long-horizon forecastability.