Background: The international accounting standard regarding goodwill gives opportunities to several accounting procedure choices, as goodwill is a complex, intangible asset. The valuation of goodwill affects equity/asset ratio and income statement, which gives that the stakeholders? impression of the group?s financial statement is affected by the valuation of this asset. It has been pointed out that difficult economic times bring impairment loss to the fore. During financial crisis, equity/asset ratio may be significant as the economy of the groups is expected to be strained.Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to explain the appearance of the possible relationship between a group?s impairment loss for goodwill and their equity/asset ratio, during financial straits.

How debt affects companies is an issue that has received much attention. The fact that researchers disagree can make it hard for companies to choose a financingpolicy that maximizes the value of the firm and its return on equity. In a world with investors that are seeking to maximize profits the value of the firm can be affected differently by different economic conditions. The intention of this study is to answer these issues with quantitive methods, with focus on year 2010 and 2009, where the value of the firm is defined as P/E and P/B ratio. The outcome showed that liabilities only affected return on equity significant in one of four cases, and liabilites didn?t affect the value of companies significantly in any of these.

Funding is essential for companies to function. All companies must relate to the funding issue, whether they are working with it in an active manner or not. Funding can be done in two ways, either through equity or debt and the ratio between these are called capital structure. Already in 1958 Modigliani and Miller concluded that a company?s capital structure does not change the value of the company, thus the company?s debt in relation to equity is irrelevant.

Abstract The internationalisation of a company is enabled by integration of markets. New markets mean new revenues, but also demand capital to finance the expansion. To bring in new capital may offer new possibilities but also higher debt-equity ratios, which affect how external interested parties value the company. This thesis, inspired by previous and mainly US based research, researches the debt-equity ratio of Swedish multinational and domestic companies, sampled from the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The research questions have focused on the impact of certain internationalisation variables on the debt-equity ratio; how does the debt-equity ratio differ between international and domestic companies? Can a difference be explained by the degree of internationalisation? Can a difference be better explained by the presence of international ownership? By measuring the concept internationalisation as both trade and presence, the questions were operationalised into four hypotheses.

Leverage buyout?s is an opportunity for companies, who can strengthen its market position by expanding its operations, and it add?s value to the company. At every LBO, copmanies make different values of the target company to finally come upp to a final bid. The final bid may in many cases be made of a surplus value, which is the differens between the value of the net-assets and the final bid. This we call goodwill and it has been a target in many discussions.

The purpose of this essay is to evaluate stock index bonds return to risk ratio in order to investigate to which degree an investor in a stock index bond take part of the underlying index return and what the investor must pay for the security of not losing his funds. In order to carry out this evaluation an average return per year and the Sharpe ratio will be calculated and a mean- standard deviation analysis will be made. All investigated stock index bonds are based on a Swedish underlying asset.The results show that the stock index bonds haven?t generated a higher risk adjusted return than its underlying asset. The stock index bonds took part of 57 % of the underlying assets return, and the loss of 10 percentage points per year for the stock index bonds compared to its underlying asset can be seen as the cost for the guarantee a stock index bond gives..

Recent years have been very turbulent for most private equity firms. Especially the financial meltdown in global economy has affected the industry, but also the public pressure has made private equity houses change their control strategies towards more conventional methods used in public companies. This thesis aims to put light on the control methods used in listed private equity houses which use a buyout strategy. The paper describes how the control methods change over the different phases the asset experience and how different value generating strategies use altered control methods. Using Merchant's (2003) framework for management control systems and Berg and Gottschalg's (2004) research on value generating strategies in buyouts the thesis shows that action controls as designing instructions for the board and a business plan, together with goal alignment is the commonly used control strategy directly after the acquisition.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether there is a correlation between the actuarial assumptions, of listed groups in Large Cap on the Nasdaq Stockholm, equity ratio and their pensionplans funding status.Method: The study is based on a quantitative research method, where the analysis of annual reports takes place. The quantitative research method has enabled the paper to perform related analyzes and comparisons of means between groups, for listed companies equity ratio and pension obligation, and the relation to its actuarial assumptions. Correlation measurements are made using a non-parametric method, Spearman's rho, then further tested using one-sided hypotheses t-test.Theory: The backbone of the thesis is presented using two theories, earnings management and the principal-agent theory. These theories are intertwined with the previous researches, which also dealt with the essay topic of earnings management in previous years and in other countries.Empirical: Correlation analyzes between the studied actuarial assumptions and corporate groups solidity and pension financial status is presentedusing tables and charts. These are further analyzed using hypothesis tests and scatterplots.Conclusion: All tests resulted in very weak correlation between the different variables and can there for not be classified as significant.

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.

The translation of financial records of foreign subsidiaries gives rise to currency translation adjustments that affect total group equity. If unwanted, fluctuations in translation adjustments can be avoided using net investment hedges. This study aims to find the extent of net investment hedging in Sweden today and in a short historical perspective, and find explanations to varying levels of hedging and firms' decisions to hedge. Based on annual reports, we determine Swedish firms' net investment hedging policies and their level of hedging. The 32 largest companies listed on the Stockholm stock exchange in the years 1993, 2004, 2006, and 2009 are studied.

Abstract: Private equity used to be synonymous with tremendous yields and rates of return. However, the private equity market trembled in 2008, due to the financial meltdown caused by the worldwide credit crisis. Considering the current low number of exits within the private equity industry, the purpose of this thesis is to examine if there has been any change in how private equity firms control their portfolio companies since the inception of the crisis. One private equity company and two portfolio companies have been studied. The case study is prepared from interviews with senior directors in the portfolio company and investment managers in the private equity firm.

Background: Within real estate companies assets according to IFRS/ IAS 40 should be valued at fair value, to compare with previous valuation criteria according to which real estate should valued at cost. Two models can be used within IAS 40, these are value at cost and fair value. When valued at cost the real estate value in the balance sheet should be specified at cost. The method chosen by the company should be used for all real estate within the company except for the premises used by the company. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to analyse and evaluate how real estate companies experienced the problems that arose when converting to IAS 40, and to analyse the effects on the companies key ratios as a result of the change of accounting method.

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.

The bachelor's thesis is to examine the explanatory factors affecting the choice of capital structure in real estate companies. The analysis is based on data collected from the main financial reporting from 2007; all listed real estate companies listed on Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Finnish stock market. Based on previous research and theories, we have defined five independent variables that are linked to the debt ratio, which are: profitability, growth, firm size, cost of debt and operational risk. The statistical tests have resulted in that we can say with certainty that profitable firms tend to have a lower debt to equity ratio. We can also say with certainty that property companies with high interest costs have a high level of indebtedness..

Uppsatsen behandlar de investeringskriterier och värderingsmetoder som svenska Private Equity-företag använder inför företagsförvärv. Vi har gjort en kvalitativ analys av fem svenska Private Equity-aktörer. Våra slutsater är att de Private Equity-bolag vi studerat har ett fåtal övergripande investeringskriterier men att de är relativt flexibla gällande resterande. Företagen använder sig främst av multipelvärdering i värderingsprocessen. Sammanfattningsvis kan vi konstatera att Private Equity-företagen fokuserar mindre på vad företaget är värt och lägger allt fokus på hur mycket företaget kan avyttras för..