In Italy in 1528 the famous author Baldassare Castiglione published the book Il Cortegiano. In words Castiglione portraits the ideal courtiers and provides a lot of advice on how to achieve the ultimate courtier manner. For example he introduces and explains the words sprezzatura and grazia. His advice spread from Italy and influenced the courts around Europe. My purpose with this study has been two folded. Firstly, I have analysed Castigliones Il Cortegiano in order to examine his vision of virtues and ideals.

My thesis deals with the novel Ladies, written in 2007 by the Swedish author Mara Lee. When published, it was received as a book belonging to the chick lit genre but still got good reviews. This combination is really unusual and awoke my interest in the novel. My thesis is therefore an analysis whether Ladies can be considered a chick lit novel or not, and in what way it is similar to or differs from the genre. I start my thesis with an overview of former research of chick lit and what earlier was called trivial literature.

To be seen is essential. Presently, the marketing of different well-known brands within the same product category is done with little variation. To marketing professionals, this creates an opportunity to market products in an unexpected way. The use of incongruent market communication and by creating a discrepancy between a well-known brand?s advertisement and brand scheme, which is already established in customers? minds, is one way to be different.

Stock lending is primarily a professional activity. The supply of stocks in the lending market comes mainly from pension funds and insurance companies, while intermediaries provide valuable services by taking positions as borrowers as well as lenders. Borrowers use stock lending for various reasons. For instance, hedge funds usually borrow stocks to cover a short position. There has been a lot of controversy in the stock lending industry and the debate has mainly concerned its effects for the stock markets.

Stock lending is primarily a professional activity. The supply of stocks in the lending market comes mainly from pension funds and insurance companies, while intermediaries provide valuable services by taking positions as borrowers as well as lenders. Borrowers use stock lending for various reasons. For instance, hedge funds usually borrow stocks to cover a short position. There has been a lot of controversy in the stock lending industry and the debate has mainly concerned its effects for the stock markets.

The thesis has as purpose to describe and analyse a decision made be the Swedish tax committee in which it was decided that a cooperative economical associations selling price, which was less than the comparable public bonds market price, would be the focus of a withdrawal tax. There are exceptions from a withdrawal tax, that is if the transaction has a business motivation. However the concept, business motivation, is narrowly interpreted both in the preparatory works and in case law, which makes it irrelevant to the situation at hand. A cooperative economical association is a form of association nearest akin to the limited companies. These types of associations have as purpose to increase their owners wealth with the benefit of freedom from personal responsibility.

A future expansion of wind power in the Nordic power system makes the balancing for the transmission system operator Svenska Kraftnät (SvK) more complicated. Up to the hour of delivery the balance responsible parties? (BRP) makes prognoses and plans, for consumption and production, to help maintain the balance in the electrical grid. How well this is accomplished is affected by the setup of the market design. Therefore SvK has proposed the following possible changes in market design: Increase the imbalance costsIntensify the regulation of imbalancesIncrease the temporal resolution on the different marketsPresent the prices for balancing power in real-timeModify the balancing market to simplify auction of consumption bidsA mapping over the BRPs? processes within planning and trading on the day-ahead, intra-day, and the balancing market has been performed in this thesis.

The Swedish food retail market contains of three major actors, ICA, KF and Axfood, all in all dominating 75 percent of the total market shares. The scant number of retailing actors indicates that the Swedish food retail market is a highly concentrated oligopoly, which as a fact has given rise to definite discussions and argumentations concerning the market situation. But is the food retail market imperfect and how do we reach a workable competition? Economic theory does not provide any clear answer on these questions, but is rather divided into two fundamentally different approaches to define competition: the static and the dynamic perspective on competition. In an attempt to examine the competition on local Swedish retail markets, the purpose of this study is to carry out an econometric model estimating the situation.

In 2003 the libraries of ten municipalities in the northern part of Sweden were each given 10 000 (SEK) by the BIN-project to purchase books on demand instead of making inter-library loans. This attempt was called Köpa på efterfrågan (Purchasing on demand). The purpose of this master thesis is to evalutate Köpa på efterfrågan. The results of the evaluation show that the books purchased on demand were quite popular. Almost all the purchased books were non-fictional with most books being bought within the field of medicin.

Work has a great influence on most of individuals in society. It influences both identity as well as the structure of the day. Unemployed people are often affected in a negative way through economic and psychological problems. In order to help people with reduced work capacity back to the labour market and decrease unemployment, the Labour Market Board works with vocational rehabilitation. The aim of this study is to investigate experiences of vocational rehabilitation within the Labour Market Board among unemployed people.

Purpose: We have three purposes that will answer our problem questions. Our first purpose is to identify how diversification effects for investors changed between emerging markets and developed markets in the period 1996-2010. Our second purpose is to examine the two crises, IT and financial crisis, and if the correlations between these two crises have changed. Our third purpose is to examine to what extent the Swedish stock market was influenced by other markets in the period 1996-2010, the IT and financial crisis.Methodology: The method is based on an analytic model consisting of two tools; Regression- and Correlation analysis. The Regression analysis will be used when investigating if a change in a foreign stock market affects a change on the Swedish stock market.

This paper treats the question about how the internationally established company, Apple, is affected by intern or extern events when it comes to the trade market. The purpose of the study is to investigate if chosen events create abnormal return on Apples stock market. The chosen research area is Steve Jobs three sick-listings, It-bubble and the purchase of the search engine company Siri. The reason of writing about this is the big interest for the stock market and its function.This study methodological starting position is quantitative done by an event study, with qualitative feature done by an interview with an expertise within this area. When analyzing the empirics, we have used the efficient market theory that says that information should not affect the stock market in the degree that abnormal return creates.

The purpose of this paper is to study the ongoing discussion concerning e-books at Swedish public libraries. The e-booksituation has as of late gained a lot attention in the media. The main distributor of e-book in Sweden - Elib - is in the centreof this discussion and our goal has been to study the opinions and arguments that have been expressed within articles and blog postsconcerning the situation.We have analysed our articles and blog posts through a qualitative text analysis in order to find the main problems of the e-bookdiscussion and which arguments are used. We have also studied the effect Elib might have on the libraries' collection developmentaccording to the articles and blog posts.We found that the major issues within the e-book situation include Elib's price model - which is costly for the libraries - thewatermarking and the selection of books available to the libraries. It is also considered, according to the author's of our articles and blog posts, that the collections at the libraries are affected byElib's system since the choice of which books to include is given to the publishers, not the libraries or its users.The articles and blog posts agree that a change needs to occur for the e-books future survival at the public libraries..

Summary Title Are older consumers of interest for the Swedish Apparel market?A study of older consumers? attitudes and interests in apparel Deadline 12 January, 2007 Course FEK 533 Authors Brusk Kutlay and Linda Nordén Tutors Björn Carlsson and Roland Knutsson Keywords Older consumer, apparel, lifestyle, attitudes, consumer behavior Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate weather the 50+ segment is a strong market for apparel, i.e. if it is an interesting market for the Swedish apparel industry. The aim is to contribute to a better understanding of consumers? attitudes toward apparel shopping on the Swedish market.

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.