Introduction: When the American investment bank Morgan Stanley suddenly decide to increase their target stock price of the Ericsson stock by 100 percent, it became the point of origin for our interest in investor relations. In this particular case the increase of target stock price was announced right after new Morgan Stanley analysts started covering the stock. Why this tremendous increase in target stock price, we will probably never know. Perhaps the new analysts perceived the information disclosed from Ericsson’s investor re-lations function different from the prior analyst, and ended up in adjusting the target stock price. Problem: Stock prices today are very dependent on the market expectations of future company growth. Market actors estimate the potential growth by analysing information disclosed by the company. It has therefore become increasingly important for companies to manage their investor relations with a strategic marketing perspective to be able to meet the internal and external needs. Companies must also present themselves to investors in a way that appeals both on a rational and an emotional level. Once new investors are attracted and old ones are kept, companies must constantly communicate about their performance to uphold investors trust and there by creating or maintain long-term relationships. Purpose: The purpose is to explore if and how a marketing perspective is applicable when managing investor relations in traded companies. Method: This study has been conducted with qualitative research method. Collection of empirical data has been done through six semi-structured interviews with directors and managers whom all work with investor relations for their respective company. The six par-ticipating companies are all traded on the Stockholm stock exchange. The collected data were first analysed with the Kotler, Kartajaya & Young (2004) model and secondly ana-lyzed from a relationship marketing point of view. Analysis: The analysis shows that our sample of companies subconsciously work in align-ment with the Kotler et al. (2004) model and that they also work with different types of re-lationship marketing. Together this provides a holistic image of how traded companies work with a marketing perspective in their investor relations. Conclusion: After having analysed our empirical findings it is our belief that a marketing perspective is applicable when managing investor relations.

Investors in the financial market are supposed to hold diversified portfolios to minimize their risk adjusted for expected return. However, several researchers have pointed out that most investors are over weighted in their home market. This means that most diversification happens in terms of choosing stocks in the home market which means that further possible diversification through international diversification is unused. One can therefore expect that foreign investors have preferences for securities with specific characteristics once they go abroad. An earlier study of the Swedish stock market over the years 1993-1997 has shown that foreign investors, in greater extent than domestic investors, have a preference for large firms, firms paying low dividend and firms with low leverage. With the steep up-turn of the Swedish stock market before the millennium and the down-turn in year 2000 in mind, this study examine whether the investment patterns between 1996 and 2005 are consistent with the results of earlier investigations. In general the results are consistent with earlier investigations. However, this study also shows that foreign investors seem to be more interested in choosing securities with relatively high fundamental value and lower level of leverage during market down-turns.

Corporate governance phenomena have traditionally been, and are still, studied foremost as relationships between principals and agents. Studies of how accounting plays out in corporate governance settings rather share the interest in hierarchical influence than challenge it. The present thesis argues that when studying accounting in corporate governance settings we must, in addition to studying hierarchical influence, take into account the ‘field of governance’ in which accounting is situated. The hierarchical influence with which the corporate governance literature is concerned does not occur in an isolated setting, but in a field with pre-existing, concurrent and entering governance initiatives, technologies and actors. Such aspects of the field of governance necessarily influence how accounting is able to serve corporate governance ends. Based on two empirical cases, institutional investors and trade unions, active in a field of governance concerned with social and environmental aspects of corporate performance, this thesis consists of four studies investigating the different aspects (who, what and where) of the field of governance and the influence these aspects have on accounting in a corporate governance setting. This thesis, as a result, proposes a new way to study accounting in corporate governance settings and identifies further conditions for accounting’s constitutive ability. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Submitted. Paper 2: Submitted. Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>

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In Alternext, companies could choose two different kinds of IPO mechanisms; one is Public Offer, and the other is Private Placement. In fact, Private Placement in Alternext means 100% book-building. This article focused on what kind of companies would intend to choose Private Placement other than Public Offer, and compared their IPO discounts and market performance with companies using another mechanism. Companies with low profitability and no family holding would prefer to use Private Placement. However, companies with highly information asymmetry and profitability would also choose Private Placement. From the view of post-IPO liquidity, we infer that companies that choose Private Placement may be due to their preference for long-term investors. Referring to IPO indirect cost, we found that companies choosing Private Placement pay higher IPO discount cost. However, their post-IPO cumulated abnormal returns (CAR) are higher than companies using Public Offering.

<p>Introduction: When the American investment bank Morgan Stanley suddenly decide to increase their target stock price of the Ericsson stock by 100 percent, it became the point of origin for our interest in investor relations. In this particular case the increase of target stock price was announced right after new Morgan Stanley analysts started covering the stock. Why this tremendous increase in target stock price, we will probably never know. Perhaps the new analysts perceived the information disclosed from Ericsson’s investor re-lations function different from the prior analyst, and ended up in adjusting the target stock price.</p><p>Problem: Stock prices today are very dependent on the market expectations of future company growth. Market actors estimate the potential growth by analysing information disclosed by the company. It has therefore become increasingly important for companies to manage their investor relations with a strategic marketing perspective to be able to meet the internal and external needs. Companies must also present themselves to investors in a way that appeals both on a rational and an emotional level. Once new investors are attracted and old ones are kept, companies must constantly communicate about their performance to uphold investors trust and there by creating or maintain long-term relationships.</p><p>Purpose: The purpose is to explore if and how a marketing perspective is applicable when managing investor relations in traded companies.</p><p>Method: This study has been conducted with qualitative research method. Collection of empirical data has been done through six semi-structured interviews with directors and managers whom all work with investor relations for their respective company. The six par-ticipating companies are all traded on the Stockholm stock exchange. The collected data were first analysed with the Kotler, Kartajaya & Young (2004) model and secondly ana-lyzed from a relationship marketing point of view.</p><p>Analysis: The analysis shows that our sample of companies subconsciously work in align-ment with the Kotler et al. (2004) model and that they also work with different types of re-lationship marketing. Together this provides a holistic image of how traded companies work with a marketing perspective in their investor relations.</p><p>Conclusion: After having analysed our empirical findings it is our belief that a marketing perspective is applicable when managing investor relations.</p>

Two essays on the stock preference and performance of institutional investors are included in the dissertation. In the first essay, I document that mutual fund managers and other institutional investors tend to hold stocks with higher betas. This effect holds even after precisely controlling for stocks’ risk characteristics such as size, book-to-market equity ratio and momentum. This is contrary to the widely accepted view that betas are no longer associated with expected returns. However, these results support my simple model where a fund manager’s payoff function depends on returns in excess of a benchmark. For the manager, on the one hand, he tends to load up with high beta stocks since he wants to co-move with the market and other factors as much as possible. On the other hand, the manager faces a trade-off between expected performance and the volatility of tracking error. My model thus shows that the manager prefers to choose higher beta than his benchmark, and that his beta choice has an optimal level which depends on his perceived factor returns and volatility. My empirical findings further confirm the model results. First, I show that the effect of managers holding higher beta stocks is robust to a number of alternative explanations including the effects of their liquidity selection or trading activities. Second, consistent with the model predictions of managers sticking close to their benchmarks during risky periods, I demonstrate that the average beta choice of mutual fund managers can predict future market volatility, even after controlling for other common volatility predictors, such as lagged volatility and implied volatility. The second essay is the first to explicitly address the performance of actively managed mutual funds conditioned on investor sentiment. Almost all fund size quintiles subsequently outperform the market when sentiment is low while all of them underperform the market when sentiment is high. This also holds true after adjusting the fund returns by various performance benchmarks. I further show that the impact of investor sentiment on fund performance is mostly due to small investor sentiment. These findings can partially validate the existence of actively managed mutual funds which underperform the market overall (Gruber 1996). In addition, when conditioning on investor sentiment, the pattern of decreasing returns to scale in mutual funds, recently documented in Chen, Hong, Huang, and Kubik (2004), is fully reversed when sentiment is high while the pattern persists and is more pronounced when sentiment is low. Further results suggest that smaller funds tend to hold smaller stocks, which is shown to drive the above patterns. I also document that smaller funds have more sentiment timing ability or feasibility than larger funds. These findings have many important implications including persistence of fund performance which may not exist under conventional performance measures. / text

High quality financial reporting is critically important for bank regulation, particularly market discipline, but limited evidence exists on why banks provide different levels of financial reporting quality. I examine whether institutional investors and financial analysts impact bank financial reporting quality. Although I find no impact of analysts on bank financial reporting quality, institutional ownership is positively associated with financial reporting quality, and this relation is strongest for banks with high information asymmetry and for “monitoring” institutional investors. Institutional investors also sell shares following the announcement of a restatement, suggesting they are willing to use the threat of exit as a mechanism to influence bank managers and demand financial reporting quality. Finally, I find institutional investors demand financial reporting quality primarily for high risk banks and also reduce ex-ante bank risk and ex-post non-performing loans. Collectively, these results suggest institutional investors are an important component of bank governance. / text

Darbe nagrinėjamos tiesioginės užsienio investicijos (TUI) Lietuvoje, analizuojama investicijų dinamika Lietuvoje 2000-2006 m.: aptariami investicijų srautų, pasiskirstymo pagal sektorius, užsienio šalis kitimas, regioniniai aspektai. Taip pat analizuojamas TUI efektyvumas šalies ekonomikos augimui analizuojant TUI ir BVP, eksporto ir importo priklausomybes. Apžvelgiami užsienio ir Lietuvos autorių pateikiami TUI teoriniai aspektai- struktūra, funkcijos, aptariama ekonominė TUI reikšmė šalies ūkiui. Pateikiama TUI reglamentuojančios teisinės bazės analizė. Apžvelgiami TUI įtakojančių sąlygų bei veiksnių apibudinimai, o taip pat ir skatinimo modeliai. Darbe taip pat aptariamos TUI tendencijos ir skatinimo perspektyvos ateityje. Apibendrinami įvairių tyrimų duomenys, nurodantys trukdžius, kurie stabdo TUI atėjimą į Lietuvą, o taip pat išryškinami šalies privalumai. / This paper examines foreign direct investment (FDI) in Lithuania, analyze the structure and range of investment during period 2000-2006 in the country. Discusses the inflows of investment, distribution of the sectors, main investors, and regions. The paper analyse the efficiency of FDI on the development of national economy, based on relationship between FDI into the main branches of economics and GDP, import and export flows. The main descriptions and classifications of foreign and Lithuanian authors about the conditions and factors that effect FDI are overlooked here. The low regulations for FDI are presented in paper also. Analyses concrete conditions and inducement for FDI in Lithuania, discusses possible alternative factors wich settle investment and stimulate it in the country. Discusses FDI changing perspectives and incentive programs in the future. Generalize results of various researches that indicate the interferences for FDI inflows. And also note the fortes which effect FDI inflows in the country. The author provides recommendations and proposals for strengthening Lithuania’s position as an FDI destination.

This thesis examines the relationship between stock market returns and systematic risk factors in twelve industrial countries. Using the APT framework, the thesis investigates the notion of international stock market integration versus segmentation in terms of pricing risk, international stock market efficiency in terms of eliminating arbitrage opportunities across domestic markets, and the validity of the international version of the APT according to a model that specifies purely domestic factors. Starting with ordinary least squares estimation the thesis investigates the responses of investors in their national stock markets to systematic shocks. By employing iterative non-linear multivariate seemingly unrelated regression estimation, this work avoids the statistical problems encountered in the second-pass test of the two-stage procedure. This study found that the international stock market was neither integrated nor efficient and that the IAPT was not supported by the results during the period investigated. It was demonstrated that partial and regional integration, regional efficiency, and regional IAPT validity cannot be ruled out. Moreover, the alternative model proved to be practically valid.