Sedan år 2005 har det varit obligatoriskt för börsnoterade företag i EU att följa den internationella redovisningsstandarden IFRS 3 vid företagsförvärv. Vid ett företagsförvärv ska förvärvaren allokera kostnaden för förvärvet genom att först värdera de materiella tillgångarna till verkligt värde, sedan de immateriella tillgångarna och till sist allokera det som eventuellt blir över till goodwill. Att identifiera immateriella tillgångar och därmed skilja dem från goodwill anses vara en svår och komplex uppgift. Företagen har kritiserats för att generellt undervärdera immateriella tillgångar och övervärdera goodwill vid företagsförvärv, för att inte lämna tillräcklig information om hur de kommit fram till goodwillbeloppet och för att inte ta uppgiften att identifiera immateriella tillgångar på allvar.Om denna kritik är riktig, vilket mycket talar för, innebär det rimligen att företagsledningarna har ett intresse av att övervärdera goodwill. Detta intresse kan vara helt oegennyttigt, och enbart för företagets bästa, men det kan också vara egennyttigt.

Swedish listed property companies report their investment properties under the standard IAS 40 that gives the opportunity to value investment properties to either historical cost or to fair value model. One problem with the fair value model is that there is no observable market price since the real estate market is far from complete which means that the price of the asset is hard to determine because of the limited information.IAS 40 gives companies the opportunity to choose between internal or external valuation and this study aims to show how the property companies? values appeared between the years 2007-2011. From the result we will study if there could be a difference in the outcome depending on if the company chose either internal or external valuation.To investigate this we observe all Swedish real estate companies listed on OMX Nordic Stockholm and their financial reports during this period of time and complement this information by interviewing people working with these matters in the property companies. The methodology for the study is therefore partly quantitative and partly qualitative since we collect data both from financial reports and from interviews.

Does goodwill affect the cost of capital? Goodwill is an asset which is characterized by much uncertainty regarding both what it is and how much it is really worth. Based on economic theory about information risk and principal-agent problems as well as theory regarding the cost of capital we test for the hypothesis that debt and equity investors perceive goodwill as something risky and hence demand compensation for taking on this extra risk. The proxies used for the cost of capital are cost of debt, beta and the EP-ratio. On a general level we find that increasing the level of goodwill seems to result in higher cost of capital as represented by the three proxies.

In this paper the effect of capital structure on profitability has been investigated among Swedish companies. The essay intends to examine how the relationship between debt and profitability appear among Swedish companies and if the relationship differs between industries. The purpose is to find out how debt affects the profitability of Swedish companies.A quantitative approach has been applied. The selection was made among companies listed on Nasdaq OMX Stockholm, which resulted in a sample of 207 companies. Several regression analyzes has been formed, based on the independent variable debt-ratio and the dependent variables profit margin, pre-tax profit margin, operating margin, return on assets and return on equity.

The law which makes the purchase, or the attempt to purchase, temporary sexual services a criminal offence has been implemented in Sweden for more than six years. It appears as if very few, possibly no, sex-selling women have used the law to report men who have bought their services during these years. How can this be understood? With this thesis I suggest a new way of thinking on agency. A way which questions the traditional view on action whereby agency equals to act in certain, predefined ways.

The recent development in several countries? legislation and best practice recommendations in relation to corporate governance in general and audit committees in particular have affected Swedish listed corporations in the form of the Swedish Corporate Governance Code and the coming EU-directive. This paper aims to discover what factors affected Swedish listed companies to form audit committees when this was entirely voluntary. We collected data from the annual reports of 121 Swedish listed companies and formed eleven hypotheses as to what factors we believed affected the voluntary formation of audit committees based on Agency Theory, economies of scale and circumstances specific to the Swedish environment. We then analyzed the data through the use of a multivariate logistic regression model.

Background: When companies decentralize their operations into profit centers, transfer pricing often becomes an integral part in intracompany trade. A profit center may affect both revenues and costs and seek to maximize profit. Transfer Pricing is a complex subject because it is affected by a large number of factors including the profit centers will to generate profits. This leads us to the subject of decision-making in a transfer pricing-systems. On what grounds are decisions made? Are transfer pricing purposes, factors and interests taken into consideration? What type of information is used in such decisions, how is the transfer price issue perceived and how is it used?Aim: The purpose of this thesis is to analyze which type of information that is makes up transfer prices, how the transfer price is perceived by different parties and how it is used for decision-making.Completion: A qualitative study has been performed with current theory as a starting point.

The purpose of this examination is to get a view of the attitude towards internet-use within after school centers. By comparing the views of pupils with the teacher?s point of view, one can notice differences that may be due to a lack of knowledge or communication. The questions are: What view does the principal, the staff, and the pupils have on internet-use in after school centers? Does their view differ? If so, how? To be able to respond to these questions, the pupils and the staff have been handed surveys and the principal has been interviewed.

Aim: The aim of this study is to analyse the possible motives behind the actions of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council in relation to the conflict in Syria. The background of this aim is the Arab Spring and the protests and violence that have followed the uprising. While, in Libya, the UN Security Council adopted resolutions that allowed sanctions against the Libyan government, no such resolutions have been adopted yet in Syria.Theory: The principal theory of the analysis is Stephen D. Krasner´s theory on sovereignty.Method: I have researched various resolutions and statements done in the Security Council, together with official statements from the actors, through Hadenius´ motive analysis methodology and Gilje & Grimen and Ödmans theories on hermeneutics.Conclusion: The conclusion of the analysis is that there, in the case of Syria and Libya, are two different parties in the Security Council. One that stands for sovereignty and one that stands for intervention.

Rapporten syftar till att belysa och analysera den svenska lagstiftningen som har kommit kallas lärarundantaget ur ett mikroekonomiskt perspektiv. Lagtexten reglerar patenträttigheter främst mellan enskilda forskare och högskolor. Syftet med analysen är att kommentera eventuella ekonomiska effekter på utformningen av system för ersättning och dess effekter på incitament att bedriva forskning. Ett resonemang om effektiv riskdelning vid kontraktsformulering förs även. Rapporten bygger främst på ekonomisk litteratur och artiklar publicerade i tidningar med ekonomisk anknytning.

Are agency and responsibility solely ascribable to humans? The advent of artificial intelligence (AI), including the development of so-called ?affective computing,? appears to be chipping away at the traditional building blocks of moral agency and responsibility. Spurred by the realization that fully autonomous, self-aware, even rational and emotionally-intelligent computer systems may emerge in the future, professionals in engineering and computer science have historically been the most vocal to warn of the ways in which such systems may alter our understanding of computer ethics. Despite the increasing attention of many philosophers and ethicists to the development of AI, there continues to exist a fair amount of conceptual muddiness on the conditions for assigning agency and responsibility to such systems, from both an ethical and a legal perspective. Moral and legal philosophies may overlap to a high degree, but are neither interchangeable nor identical.

Arbetet som presenteras i den här rapporten handlar om ansiktsigenkänning från webbkameror med hjälp av principal component analysis samt artificiella neurala nätverk av typen feedforward. Arbetet förbättrar tekniken med hjälp av filterbaserade metoder som bland annat används inom ansiktsdetektering. Dessa filter bygger på att skicka med redundant data av delregioner av ansiktet..

Frånvaron av priser och förvirring kring vem som konsumerar tjänsten gör att effektiviteten i sjukförsäkringsadministrationen inte kan bedöms utifrån den gängse nationalekonomiska definitionen. I denna uppsats definierar jag kriterier för effektivitet i handläggning av sjukförsäkringen. Vad och hur mycket som skall produceras bestäms av politikers efterfrågan. Hur det skall produceras på rätt sätt varierar mellan olika sjukfall. Utifrån dessa kriterier analyseras därefter lösningar på ett principal-agentproblem inom Försäkringskassan.

The purpose with this essay is to describe how the principal, social worker and the teacher work to prevent bullying at school. The following questions have been discussed:Does the school have an action plan for bullying, and if so, what does it say? Who has the practical responsibility for making sure that the plan is followed, and how does that responsibility work? How is the responsibility divided between the different professions? Are the children in any way active in the planning of the work against bullying? What does the children think about who has the main responsibility for stopping bullying?The method I have used in the essay is individual interviews with principals, welfare officers and teachers from two schools.My results show that the schools have different ways of handling bullying, and different forms of cooperation within the staff. One school have active students in the work against bullying in the form of classmate support (kamratstödjare). The social worker is used in different ways in the work against bullying.

AbstractComing to new job is not that easy, sometimes the feeling of insecurity appears. Working for recruitment agencies includes constant changes of colleagues and places of work and at the same time one has two different managers. Who does the individual turn to when problems occur and who do the employed see as his/her manager? Why do people search for work in recruitment agencies? How does it feel not having a fixed place of work or colleagues and how do the aspects of this affect the employed psychosocial work environment? This is a few questions asked when we tried to find answers on the employed feelings about his/hers psychosocial work environment in a recruitment agency. The purpose of this study was to find a deeper understanding on employees working in a recruitment agency experiences their psychosocial work environment on the basis of social support, demands and control.