There is an increased pressure for firms to provide the financial market with additional information. Such disclosure is attached with different kinds of costs. In spite of these costs, and in spite of increased mandatory disclosures, firms choose to voluntary disclosure financial information to analysts and others. This indicates that firms also benefit from providing additional information. The subjects of this study is 431 annual reports from firms listed at the Stockholm Stock Exchange for 2002 and 2005 and the objective is to survey factors that can explain variations in firms? voluntary disclosure.

This thesis discusses the Swedish drug policy and its principle of prohibition. In the world of today there is an ongoing discussion about prohibition and the concept of harm reduction. This thesis is an analysis of Swedish drug policy and an investigation as to whether the prohibition concept is in a state of decline. It tries to answer the question; is the Swedish drug policy moving away from its prohibition principle towards a harm reduction principle? The recent debate, articles, documents and earlier research has been analyzed in order to find answers to my questions.

Companies that sell digital products such as software and movies transfer large amounts of data to its customers. In order to send this amount of data using FTP or HTTP and still maintain a high speed transfer rate it is required that the company have a large number of servers and a huge bandwidth. Servers and bandwidth costs money which means they have great costs on the distribution of their products. In order to reduce distribution costs, P2P technology can be used and the most powerful technology to transmit popular files is called BitTorrent.BitTorrent requires users to share their bandwidth. Nowadays, BitTorrent is frequently used to transfer products that are free of charge; one example is the Linux distribution Ubuntu.

Through extensive research it has shown that today?s sail boat owners are very frustrated concerning the limited choice of engine alternatives offered by today?s market. Besides rising fuel-costs, environmental awareness is very important in today?s society. Hence it is vital to find alternative environmental-friendly motors and replace combustion-engines. Zilent Ocean is an extensive project within Development engineering program at Halmstad University.

the most obvious problem at Traction today is the in-between handling that demands much time and resources. The reason is that the packages are not designed with handling in mind. Several of the packages of today also have a poor degree of utilization that means there is room for a fewer number of articles. That in turn means more packages, more transports, more storage space and more staff. On the basis of a specification of demands ? which take quality and environmental influence, as well as transport, handling and economy in account ? we have developed suggestions on new packages that will facilitate handling and lower the total costs, The time of handling will in some cases abbreviate to just a few seconds with the new packages.

The Energy Market Inspectorate is implementing a new tariff regulation in Sweden. A small part of the new regulation concerns effectible operation costs and originally they where intended to be calculated using a modification of equivalent comparison standards, in Swedish Ekm. This thesis is intended to analyze if Fortums grid in Stockholm could be described correctly, using equivalent comparison standards. In Ekm every part of the distribution grid is designated a weighting in relation to 1 km 0.4kV over head line. These Ekm-measurements are intended to simplify comparison between different grid areas with different structure and geographical conditions.

The agriculture is today in a development that leads to bigger and bigger units in the primary production. To be able to follow this development many companies chooses to cooperate in different ways. The most radical change is when farmers fuses with other farmers and merge into to a big collectively owned operation firm. The reason behind this idea is that the firms achieve the big companies advantages by being complement to each other. The purpose of this essay is to make an economic analysis of two crop production companies who works together in an operation firm.

The project was initiated by Medipharm which produce microbial inoculants which used as additives to preserve forage. The main goal was to test three inoculants to produce maize silege. The following Medipharm produced inoculants were tested, Milab 393, Lactisil Wolecrop II, Lactisil 300 2. An untreated control was included in the study. The trial was done at Swedish university of Agriculture and Science in Alnarp, Sweden. Eurostar was the cultivar of the maize and was grown on 20, 5 hectares.

The semantic web is a vision of the Internets future, there machines and humans can understand the same information. To make this possible, documents have to be provided with metadata in a general language. W3C has created Web Ontology Language (owl) for this purpose.This report present the creation of a LaTeX package, which makes it possible to include metadata in pdf files. It also presents how you can create annotations, which are bound to the metadata that's been generated. With the help of this package it's easy to create pdf documents with automatically generated metadata and annotations..

With the globalization, companies in the West chose to shift production to developing countries to cut down costs. This had a major impact when child labor and very poor working conditions in these factories were discovered and led many companies to take responsibility for their suppliers and the employees by adopting voluntary so-called Codes of Conduct.There is a subtle balance to enforce improvement of working conditions for employees at suppliers´ factories and to keep costs down. On the one hand, companies would like to conduct extensive audits at their suppliers to ensure code of conduct compliance and thus protect their legitimacy. On the other hand, audits are expensive so companies would like to minimize audits to keep costs down. Companies thus have to strike a delicate balance in relation to how many and what suppliers they choose to audit.

Ever since it was first introduced in an article in the Journal of Finance 1952, Harry Markowitz? mean - variance model for portfolio selection has become one of the best known models in finance. The model was one of the first in the world to deal with portfolio optimization mathematically and have directly or indirectly inspired the rest of the world to develop new portfolio optimization methods. Although the model is one of the greatest contributions to modern portfolio theory, critics claim that it may have practical difficulties. Partly because the Markowitz model is based on various assumptions which do not necessarily coincide with the reality.

Ditch cleaning is increasingly important in Swedish forestry. This study compare different concepts concerning machinery, namely two general-purpose excavators of different sizes, 8 tonnes and 15 tonnes, versus a dedicated machine constructed solely to deal with ditch-cleaning. The machines were tested on rough as well as on gentle terrain and on open terrain as well as in young stands in connection with thinning. The conclusions were that the excavators are more versatile and have greater capacity than the dedicated machine, while the latter excels in quality of work. Interestingly, there was no significant difference in performance between the both excavators..

In the assembly process of airframe structures there are many drilled holes and on some parts the holes are mainly drilled manually with pneumatic handheld drilling machines. During conventional drilling in metal, burrs appear. To remove these burrs the parts of the structure must be separated and deburred before they can be put together for fastening. This is a time consuming measure and therefore expensive. To facilitate this process and lower production costs some parts of the process needs to be automated.A part of this thesis was a project in co-operation with Saab, Novator, Specma Automation and the University of Linköping.

The market for biofuels from the forests have had a positive development and the job initiators for this master´s thesis wanted to examine the profitability of a method for harvesting forest fuel, which was unfamiliar to them. The method was the ?long tree tops-method?, here called the LT-method. The LT-method is characterised by the fact that timber is harvested as the only roundwood assortment while the rest of the stem, which in other cases would become pulpwood, is harvested as forest fuel together with the logging residues. The method is based on the assumption that advantages in handling of the forest fuel assortment such as increased load weights for forest hauling and truck transportation, should compensate for the lower price for pulpwood when sold as forest fuel. The aim of the study was to compare the profitability of the LT-method with the GROT-method (harvest of timber, pulpwood and logging residues) and conventional logging without any harvest of forest fuel, and aslo to try to identify factors affecting the profitability of the different methods.

During 2006 SNVDB (the national road data base for forestry) is being introduced to Holmen Skog. This data base contains all information about Holmen Skogs road systems. The information will then be used in different kinds of optimisation models which only produce correct and reliable results if the input data are of the adequate quality. Today there are reasons to believe that road data is of various qualities. The forest roads are often in a bad condition and have to be improved before a planned harvest. The cost of maintenance and construction of new roads is a large part of the total harvesting cost.