Purpose: The purpose of this dissertation is to enhance investor’s understanding about the differences between various financial securities that are issued by the same company.

Introduction: The development of the financial markets has created an increased range of financial securities. Same companies have also issued various financial securities, which means that the investors face the dilemma of choosing between the options. Previous researches disagree on how these various securities differ from each other, because their results have shown to be dependent on the location of investigation.

Method: Previous studies have been used as the basis for the formulation of this study’s hypothesis, which means that it has a deductive character. The purpose of the study requires large amounts of data to be analyzed, which entails that a quantitative method has been used. The study has analyzed Swedish companies that have issued at least two different securities. By creating various portfolios that contain each security class we have been able to analyze the differences and to answer our research question.

Conclusion: The result shows that there are some differences between various financial securities issued by the same company. This means that investor must carefully evaluate their options before implementing an investment, since the risk is greater for securities with superior voting power.

 Key Words: Risk, return, risk-adjusted return, financial securities, investors

As change sweeps across the public sector, a huge range of accounting and financial management challenges are created. This textbook analyses the reforms that are being introduced to deal with these challenges and their global impact on the public sector.

Readers are provided with an international overview of government accounting, reporting, management control, cost accounting, budgeting and auditing. In explaining how innovative financial management tools are utilized in the public sector, the authors address a number of emerging issues:

• Harmonization trends in public financial management and International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSASs)
• Financial reporting and consolidated financial statements in the public sector
• Public sector management accounting and control methods
• Financial and performance auditing in the public sector

This concise and accessible textbook will be core reading for public sector accounting and financial management students and will also be required reading for students of public management and administration more generally. Managers, accountants, consultants and auditors working in the public sector will also find the book a useful reference.

Public non-profit organizations are groups of people with common interests working towards specific goals. To be able to operate, the organizations require resources generated by the society through gifts and donations. Therefore, the organizations are dependent on the stakeholders to be able to survive the market. Organizations also require that the society assumes the non-profit organizations to be legitimate. Legitimacy can be created and maintained through various strategies, including annual reports as one of the tools to do so. The purpose of the study is to create an understanding of how public non-profit organizations uses annual reports to create and maintain legitimacy. A qualitative content analysis is adapted on ten annual reports of public non-profit organizations through a research model to identify codes, keywords and meaningful components in an encoding scheme. The research model is based on previous research on four different strategies; inform, adapt, modify and manipulate. The results of the study indicate that public non-profit organizations inform, adapt, modify or manipulate in order to create and maintain legitimacy through the annual reports. The study’s theoretical contribution is a further developed theoretical model for future research. The study’s social contribution is to contribute with an understanding of how the public non-profit organizations in Sweden create and maintain legitimacy through annual reports.

Since the 1990s, the Swedish education market has gone through a dramatic transformation due to the introduction of voucher-funded independent schools. We make use of data on school applications to condition on student preferences for independent versus public education, and estimate a positive relationship between independent upper secondary school attendance and grades, graduation rates, and post-secondary education. We however also find strong indications of more lenient grading standards in independent schools, especially in schools organized as for-profit entities and in schools with a low share of qualified teachers. Our results suggest that, although independent school attendance seems to benefit the individual students in terms of higher grades and increased transition to post-secondary studies, grade inflation in the Swedish upper secondary independent schools may be a serious problem.

Background and problem: As more and more Swedish companies choose to report sustainability, we considered board characteristics to play a major role and we wanted to explore how their characteristics affect the sustainability report.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how board characteristics affect sustainability by studying and analyzing the companies' annual reports.

Method: The study is deductive with a positivistic approach to produce answers in terms of our hypotheses. Data collection was carried out by collecting and analyzing annual reports and sustainability reports. The quantitative method consists of a study involving 120 companies listed on the Stockholm Stock exchange. All companies are under Large Cap and Medium Cap.

Theory: The sustainability report contains a different perspective that explains the company's sustainable development and how the board's various characteristics affect that report. The study uses stakeholder theory, legitimacy theory, institutional theory, agency theory and positive accounting theory.

Analysis and Conclusion: In the analysis we test our hypotheses against the statistical tests to see if there is a positive significant relationship between the hypotheses. Then we present the results of the hypotheses in the conclusion. Our results show that there is no positive significant correlation between all the variables. However, we have observed that there is a positive significant relationship in terms of number of employees in the company. The more employees the company has, the more they are prone to sustainability reporting.

This work proposes to examine the governance structure of public-private corporations that manage local utilities (water, energy and multi-utility) in Italy. The objective is the verification, from a qualitative point of view, that the governance structure adequately guarantees the reconciliation of interests of different categories of shareholders (public and private), as local public service corporations increases their own shareholding basis by involving financial and industrial shareholders who bring with them both financial and industrial interests. The work shows that the corporate governance structure is one important tool in the end of the public owner in order to steer and control the public and private corporations.

This article analyses consolidated annual accounts in the public sector in six countries (Sweden, the UK, the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia) highlighting the differences and similarities in approaches. The authors also examine international trends and take an in-depth look at the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board (IPSASB).

Purpose – The purpose of this viewpoint paper is to introduce the special issue and outline its major themes.

Design/methodology/approach – The public governance literature is described, and the necessity for analysing challenges for accountability and accounting in the public sector is elaborated upon, as a precursor to introducing the contributions to this special issue.

Findings – The public governance turn in public management and policy studies has often meant that accounting and accountability issues have been overlooked. This special issue reminds us that they are central in public governance and networks, and that accounting cannot be dismissed as only a “technical” issue since it is central in power relationships, building trust, ensuring transparency and improving decision making for both internal and external stakeholders.

Research limitations/implications – This special issue of Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management aims to stimulate qualitative research on how accounting and accountability are being shaped by the new public governance paradigm and, in turn, contribute to shaping it.

Practical implications – The articles included in this special issue focus on reforms and innovations that have been adopted based on the assumption that improving mechanisms of public governance and accountability will result in better public sector performance. The different aspects of governance and accounting changes will also be of interest to politicians, managers, citizens, and those who seek accountability from public sector organisations.

Originality/value – The paper offers a systematic empirical examination of the innovative experiences of different governments to strengthen transparency, openness and participation, and to enhance the capacity to manage, steer and monitor contracts, partnerships and relationships with private and public sector entities.

Price responsiveness is argued to be one important factor determining the possibility for a natural monopoly such as a district heating company to exercise its monopoly power. Increased price responsiveness, measured, for example, by the own price elasticity, reduces monopoly power, as consumers increasingly reduce demand as a response to a price increase. However, consumers in single houses having individual metering have presumably higher price responsiveness compared to consumers in residential buildings using collective metering. One major question raised in this paper is thus whether single houses show larger price responsiveness compared to residential buildings. Using cross-sectional data for 187 networks in Sweden for the year 2007 indicates that even if single houses have higher price responsiveness, district heating reveals in general a very inelastic behavior.

The paper argues for and defines a locked-in consumer as a consumer that is involuntary locked into one system in spite of an economic incentive to change. A locked-in consumer is therefore not seen as a loyal consumer but instead is assumed to be loyal to a system in spite an obvious economic gain of switching. Being defined as a natural monopoly in its technique, district heating has long been criticized for its eventual abuse of this monopoly position. Therefore, assuming well functioning ex-ante competition, the study calculates switching costs for switching from district heating to pellet burners or heat pumps. The analysis show that there exist relatively substantial benefits of switching from district heating to pellet burning or heat pumps, especially in residential urban areas. With limited available relevant markets, district heating being the only alternative, this negative switching cost cannot be capitalized and represents, in the assumed absence of loyal customers, a lock-in effect. The result indicates that we cannot reject the idea that the district heating plants serving residential areas inStockholm misuse their dominant position resulting in a reduction of the social welfare.

En låg prisrespons hos konsumenter är en av förutsättningarna för ett naturligt monopol, som ett fjärrvärmeföretag, skall kunna utnyttja sin monopolställning. Fjärrvärme säljs företrädesvis för uppvärmning till flerbostadshus och småhus där småhusen har individuell mätning av förbrukningen medan flerbostadshusen har kollektiv mätning av förbrukningen. En grundläggande hypotes i denna studie är att småhusägare har en högre användarflexibilitet än konsumenter i ett flerbostadshus. I analysen används tvärsnittsdata för 187 fjärrvärmeverk i Sverige för året 2007 och resultatet indikerar att småhusägaren uppvisar en tydligt högre priselasticitet jämfört med flerbostadshuset. Analysen visar dessutom att varje ytterligare småhus som kopplas på i fjärrvärmenätet genererar en resultatminskning medan varje ytterligare flerbostadshus genererar en tydlig uppgång av rörelseresultatet för fjärrvärmeföretaget på orten.

China's increased participation in the global market for iron ore has had tremendous impacts of various kinds. The ore has changed routes and destinations. In 2010, China had reached a point at which it alone accounted for over 50% of the global trade of iron ore. These large changes are unavoidably mirrored in the price that rose dramatically following the Chinese increased demand for iron ore. It was only Brazil and Australia that responded with higher production, an increased production that in no way did cover the increased demand from China. As Australia and Brazil increased their respective export to China, they both reduced their export to almost every other country such as the US, Germany and France who all have reduced their steel production. Other exporting countries like India, Canada and Sweden could not respond fast enough to the demand increase since these countries did not have the ability to adjust their respective production in the immediate and short run. These countries have, as a consequence, gained economic rent due to higher prices and are expected to reinvest in order to increase production in the near future.

This paper studies different concentration and dominance measures using structural indexes used to initially screen the competitive situation in a market. The Nordic and Swedish electricity markets are used as the empirical cases. Market concentration issues in the Nordic electricity market in general and in Sweden in particular have been, at least in initial screenings, approached by the Herfindahl–Hirsch- man Index (HHI). This article uses an alternative measure to HHI, which is based on market shares of the two largest firms in the market. The results shows that only the Swedish wholesale market has a firm that can be regarded as dominant, but only during very short periods. The results from a hypothetical merger between the second and third largest company in the Swedish wholesale market shows that when the dominant position of the largest firm is reduced, by increasing the size of the second largest firm, the threshold value indicates that competition actually will increase (contradicting to the HHI).

Purpose/aim

The purpose of the research is to analyze the relationship between water pollution (WP) and the economic development in China. We found a vicious cycle that at the same time as China’s economy has developed; the WP has become the focus of attention, and has also caused huge economic losses. Faced with this situation, this topic is really worth to study.

Design/methodology/approach

The research adopted a quantitative methodology for the exploration, and conducted a survey through questionnaires which were answered by different people. These respondents come from four areas in China. After having conducted the survey, we selected three typical provinces as representative for each area, and surveyed the basic information about these places. The sample information was calculated by the Chi-square test. The results will be analyzed together with the findings below.

Findings

The findings indicated that through an analysis of GDP, population, the economic development level and the degree of WP, there is relationship between economic development and WP. When people ignore the problem of WP, and just focus on the economy, the relationship shows that the more developing of economy, the more serious the WP becomes.

Originality/value

The original idea in our dissertation is to discuss the relationship between economic development and WP in China. The water problem and economic development form a vicious circle. And it seriously affects the whole China. The study has a value for the improvement of the environmental awareness of all the people in China, and advocates the government to develop the economy, and at the same time protect the water sources.

Although numerous studies have been carried out on economic growth and credit expansion, very few studies have examined direct causality between growth and credit market composition. Furthermore, with a few exceptions, most previous studies have tested how credit market development affects macroeconomic variables by using aggregate data. The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the causal nexus between enterprise credit, household credit, and economic growth by using a sample of six OECD countries. The bootstrap panel Granger causality approach is utilized to detect the direction of causality. The results show that there is a unidirectional causality running from credit to economic growth in the case of the household sector and unidirectional causality running from economic growth to credit in the case of the enterprise sector in the most countries under review. The policy implication of the findings is that credits offered to households contribute to a greater extent to economic growth than credits offered to enterprises.

The validity of "augmented" Wagner's Law is evaluated using a sample of twelve OECD countries over the period of 1995-2015. The bootstrap panel Granger causality approach is utilized to detect the direction of causality between government spending and GDP, focusing on cross-sectional dependence, slope heterogeneity, and structural breaks. The results show a causal relationship in favor of Wagner's Law in seven countries, thus GDP is long-run forcing to government expenditures and that the causality runs from the former to the latter variable. The policy implication of the findings is that the upholding of Wagner's Law in the presence of aging population growth and increasing demand for welfare services may force policy makers to raise taxes or it leads to excessive borrowing which might affect sustainability of public finances. (C) 2019 The Society for Policy Modeling. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Pasturelands is a land with high biodiversity, in order to keep them open with herbivores, there is environmental support from Landsbygdsprogrammet designed to benefit the biological diversity. Wild boars (Sus Scrofa) have increased markedly in recent decades, which has led to major economic consequences for agriculture and it´s land. From previous research, we can see that the damage does not adversely affect biodiversity. Biodiversity is a central part of the environmental support that the farmers receive to keep their pasturelands open. But what does landowners say about the problems with wild boar on pasturelands and how do they look on the future? The study is based on the landowners ‘perspective, we examine how landowners experience wild boar damage to their pasturelands and how the damage affects their management. We also examine how landowners experience the advice and support they receive from the authority and what changes they want to see in wild boar management. In the study, we choose to use qualitative research interviews, in which six landowners were interviewed. The result of the study show that landowners feel that the biggest problem is that the damage is time-consuming and costly to repair. There was also criticism of today´s design of environmental support and the pressure from the wild boar population must be reduced in order to keep their land open in the future. The conclusion is that there must be a greater holistic approach to wild management to reduce the damage and more individual advice for the individual landowner.

The increased global connectivity and increased mobility of both humans and capital have created competition between cities and regions when it comes to attracting resources in order to achieve their developmental goals and place branding is today an important research field. The residents’ view of the place where they live is important for the local authority since it can influence future migration but also affect investment attraction and business migration. A measurement of the place brand satisfaction from a resident’s point of view is therefore an essential performance indicator for places (Insch & Florek, 2008).

In this study it is argued that the product place consists of both service such as schools and libraries as well as more tangible features such as roads and parks and thus offers a good setting for applying a service management perspective. The core of the product place can be regarded as services and as a consequence it is very important that the encounters with the place are characterized by a high service quality. Service management has been discussed together with place branding before (Warnaby, 2009; Ashworh & Kavaratzis, 2010) but to our knowledge without presenting a framework for analysis and the empirical material is very limited. This paper applies a service management perspective in evaluating the resident place satisfaction by using a survey and thus offers new insights to the field.

This study make use of event study methodology to investigate effects on stock price derived from inclusion or exclusion in the index OMXS30. Effects on price derived from revision of indexes are difficult to theoretically explain. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether inclusion or exclusion from the index OMXS30 creates abnormal returns, and if the abnormal returns itself creates a cost for index funds which are tracking OMXS30. To calculate abnormal returns we calculate the actual returns for each stock, and compare the actual returns with expected returns calculated with the Fama and French Model. The event window extends from 15 days before the revision of the OMXS30 to 15 days after the revision of OMXS30. The result shows that no significant abnormal returns can be observed on the day the revision takes place. When stocks are included into OMXS30 they show significant negative average abnormal return for the period T+1 to T+15. When stock are excluded from OMXS30 they show significant negative average abnormal return for the period T-15 to T-1. This study provides brief support for the downward sloping theory and the price-pressure hypothesis explanatory power when analyzing abnormal returns related to revisions in OMXS30. This study does also carefully link the abnormal returns to special costs for index funds, driven by the mechanical and predictable behavior from the index funds themselves.

This article considers two coarse measures applicable to antitrust policy: one of market concentration, the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) and one of market dominance, threshold value. Calculations of threshold value are compared to HHI values to determine when thresholds might be of specific use in merger cases. Many scenarios which satisfy the threshold conditions (indicating a dominant firm exists) are consistent with high HHI numbers such that current US Department of Justice and European Commission guidelines (based on HHIs) for merger concerns will have been met. It is suggested as a rule of thumb that HHIs be used as necessary conditions and threshold value be considered sufficient conditions for further case review.

The interest of saving in funds has risen in recent years. Since eight of ten Swedes have got savings in funds it’s important to investigate what affects the funds’ performance, based on who manages the fund.

The purpose of the study is to contribute with increased knowledge about what affects the performance of fund managers. The focus of the study is firstly on different demographic aspects and how they affect the risk-adjusted returns. Secondly the study examines whether group performances are superior to individuals. Lastly the study also examines whether more diverse groups perform better than less diverse groups.

The study is based on a positivistic approach and a research strategy with a deductive approach. The method selection is characterized by a quantitative approach where data is based on non-index funds in the Morningstar categorization of Sverigefonder.

The overall conclusions of the study is that different demographical aspects have different effects on the risk-adjusted returns. Groups generally perform worse than individuals and the study also concludes that the more diversified the group gets, the worse the results will be.

Internetbaserade auktioner har letat sig in i ”folkhemmet”. Auktionerna har också blivit ett forum för rationellt såväl som emotionellt drivna köpbeslut. I denna studie analyseras huruvida auktionstiden (119 auktioner; 58 presentkort och 61 konsertbiljetter) är en prispåverkande faktor. Auktionerna visade en relativ värdestegring (slutbudet dividerat med det begärda priset) när tidsra­men för auktionen krympte. Samtidigt fanns det inte någon signifikant skill­nad mellan antalet bud i långa respektive korta auktioner som kunde förklara värdestegringen. Resultaten diskuteras mot en bakgrund av hur tid bidrar till, alternativt, motverkar ekonomisk rationalitet.