CEO compensation is an important issue since shareholders, politicians, regulators, and the media have different opinions on the appropriate level. Critics argue that CEO compensation is excessive due to the weak link to firm performance, but even though the field has been thoroughly researched there are mixed findings regarding the relationship between CEO compensation and firm performance. Literature suggests that this could be due to that each economy is unique and has its specificities when determining CEO compensation. CEO compensation in Sweden is generally lower than in the US and Britain, but the performance of the firm is the same or even better. Therefore, the aim of this paper was to study the relationship between CEO compensation and firm performance in the Swedish context. Through a univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analysis of 38 firms on the Nasdaq OMX Stockholm, our findings show that there is no significant relationship between CEO compensation and firm performance in Swedish listed firms when using standard control variables. This result is more consistent with the managerial power theory and less with the agency theory and contract theory. The findings suggest that there is no alignment between Swedish CEOs' compensation incentives and the shareholders' interest (i.e., firm performance).

This study investigates how family ownership affects firms' financing decisions in Sweden. The study uses data on publicly listed firms in Sweden from 2014-2019 with 730 firm-year observations. Sweden has a significant portion of family firms and a business environment where control-enhancing mechanisms are used to a large extent. Agency theory and previous studies suggest that higher leverage is applied by controlling families to maintain corporate control and avoid ownership dilution. The reason is that family owners have undiversified portfolios and a strong long-term business commitment. The hypothesis is tested with fixed effects regressions. The findings show that family firms tend to be more leveraged than non-family firms, although family ownership does not impact the financing decisions of Swedish companies. The reason is that higher firm leverage in family-controlled firms is not caused by the family ownership characteristics but rather by firm-specific characteristics, such as larger firm size, lower profitability and higher tangibility, compared to their counterparts. These results imply that Swedish family companies do not apply debt issuance as a control-enhancing mechanism to preserve firm control and avoid ownership dispersion.

Title: The relationship between Key Audit Matters and Audit Committees: A quantitative study on 310 Swedish companies.   Level: Master Programme in Business Administration, Accounting.   Author: Albin Eriksson and Emilia Thunell   Supervisor: Asif M Huq   Date: 2023 - May   Aim: The purpose of this thesis is to see how the quality of the audit committee relates to the number of key audit matters in the audit report. The quality of the audit committee will be determined through meeting frequency, independence in the audit committee, size of the committee, diversity in the committee, if the members are getting remuneration explicit for being in the audit committee, how many words that describe the work of the audit committee in the annual reports, and if the committee is separated from the board of directors, so-called dedicated.   Method: This is a quantitative study that has been conducted with descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, VIF analysis, multivariate regression, univariate regression, and a Poisson regression to ensure the result in the multivariate analysis.   Results and conclusions: The result of this thesis shows a significant relationship between our dependent variable key audit matters and two of our independent variables, meeting frequency and remuneration. The conclusion is that the institutional structure can have an impact on the audit committee's effect on key audit matters, since Swedish companies already have a lot of corporate governance mechanisms, which can mean that companies get more ineffective in having an audit committee.    Contribution of the thesis: The theoretical contribution is a broad view on the characteristics effect on key audit matters, and a contribution to the research in a strong institutional structure. The practical contribution is that companies can use this study to evaluate if they need an audit committee or not.    Suggestions for future research: Suggestions for future research is to examine more EU countries, to see if EU regulations have a major impact on companies corporate governance, or if the institutional differences in the different countries have a bigger impact.    Key words: Key Audit Matters, Audit Committee, Agency Theory, Audit committee characteristics, Institutional structure

Earnings management is widely implemented by managers, which may be the result of weak monitoring. This study is based on 140 companies to capture the effect of shareholder activism (proxied by shareholder proposals) on earnings management. This study adds to the literature by focusing on how the presence of foreign directors on the board moderates this relationship. This study investigatesthe influence of foreign directors by taking the proportion of foreign directors, as well as by measuring the regulation distance of their home countries to the U. S. The result from the empirical analyses implies that shareholder activism can lead to a lower level of earnings management due to improved monitoring. A higher proportion of foreign directors and a closer regulation distance of their home countries to the U. S do not help shareholder activists to reduce earnings management. Decreasing monitoring effectiveness leads to a higher level of earnings management.

Titel: Ägarkoncentration och earnings management i svenska börsnoterade bolag.  Nivå: Kandidat Författare: Maja Johansson och Helene Schramm  Handledare: Jan Svanberg Datum: Januari 2024 Syfte: Att undersöka det potentiella sambandet mellan ägarkoncentration och earnings management bland företag noterade på den svenska börsen. Metod: Detta är en kvantitativ studie som syftar till att mäta och kvantifiera fenomen genom en deduktiv ansats. För att genomföra studien har data samlats in både i form av vetenskapliga artiklar som legat till grund för uppsatsens teorikapitel, samt variabler som använts för att utföra de beräkningar som syftat till att besvara frågeställningen. Insamling av data har skett både genom urvalsföretagens årsredovisningar och databasen Refinitive Eikon. I denna studie har den modifierade Jones modellen använts för att beräkna diskretionära periodiseringar, som i denna studie är ett mått på earnings management.  Resultat & slutsats: För att testa studiens två hypoteser genomfördes en multipel linjär regression som visade ett positivt och signifikant samband mellan ägarkoncentration och diskretionära periodiseringar. Likaså upptäcktes ett positivt samband mellan avkastning på totalt kapital och diskretionära periodiseringar, medan skuldsättningsgrad och företagets storlek inte uppvisar något fastställt samband med diskretionära periodiseringar. Slutsatsen av denna studies resultat blir därför att det föreligger ett samband mellan ägarkoncentration och earnings management.   Bidrag: Denna uppsats bidrar till ytterligare kunskap kring ägarkoncentrationens påverkan på earnings management i en svensk kontext där det råder hög ägarkoncentration. Fortsatt forskning: En förlängning av denna studie skulle kunna innefatta forskning som undersöker effekterna av earnings management och att genom en kvalitativ metod undersöka hur intressenternas beslutsfattande påverkas av fenomenet.  Nyckelord: Earnings management, ägarkoncentration, ägarstruktur, den modifierade Jones modellen, Agency theory

During 2021, mergers and acquisitions (also known as M&A) experienced record-breaking numbers. In line with there being an array of M&As having been realized, there also exist various and multiple reasons for the company owners to go through with the process - or to decline the offer. As such, the motives and reasoning steering the owner’s decision regarding offers from external actors constitute a fascinating research area. Thus, out of interest of the aforementioned, the aim of this study is to provide a deeper understanding of the motives driving the decision-making of family-owned business owners in times of external offers being put on the table. Undertaking this endeavor, the frameworks of Socioemotional Wealth Theory (SEW) and Agency Theory (Economic-Rational) constitute key theoretical concepts. More specifically, we ask: how does the family who owns the business value an external offer - and why do they reason the way they do? Conducting semi structured interviews with four owners of small family companies located in Småland, this thesis provides insights and interpretations generated by a qualitative research design and abductive data collection. The conclusion drawn is that motives differ greatly. More specifically, the evaluation of external offers is generally impacted by values and priorities associated with SEW. However, in connection to suboptimal change-of-generation possibilities, the economic-rational reasoning receives greater attention. Thus, recognizing the importance of change-of-generation, future research should explore this factor more extensively.

After Shleifer and Vishny (1997) introduce agency conflicts between controlling insiders and outside investors, a new research trend has emerged, which focuses on controlling insiders' incentives for opportunistic behavior and assumes that controlling insiders may want more opaque corporate information environment to mask their pursuance of private control benefits. However, there are still open issues on the topic of how different controlling shareholder types, such as business group owners, institutional owners and family owners, each affect corporate information environment. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the different roles of controlling ownership types on corporate informational environment. Chapter 1 examines earnings management behaviors of firms affiliated with business groups, using a unique dataset for South Korean business groups (chaebols) between 1993 and 2007. Contrary to predictions of agency theory, we find that group firms are actually less engaged in earnings management than non-group firms, and we offer controlling family's concern for group reputation as an explanation. Group firms are also shown to use more real cash flow-based earnings management than discretionary accruals management. The results are robust with respect to the method of control sample construction, alternative models and group definitions, and endogeneity. There is also evidence that corporate reforms undertaken in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, including regulations on auditing and combined group-wide financial reports, appear to have mitigated the use of earnings management by group firms. These results are consistent with the notion that concerns for group reputation may mitigate agency-based opportunistic earnings management behaviors. Chapter 2 examines whether domestic and foreign institutional investors improve corporate transparency in the presence of controlling benefits. We construct the transparency index, as well as its sub-indices based on firm- and market-level information, using group and non-group firm-level data for South Korea between 2001 and 2007. The results show that foreign institutional ownership improves overall corporate transparency, while the effects of domestic institutional ownership are insignificant. This is traceable to sub-index findings that foreign investors are associated with improvement in both firm-level and market-level transparency, while domestic institutional investors are associated with a decrease in firm-level transparency, but with an increase in market-level transparency, which may offset each other. The effects are non-linear for domestic institutional ownership, while those of foreign institutional ownership remain monotonic. These findings are consistent with the notion that domestic institutional investors are conflicted by their role as monitors to boost transparency and by their desire to pursue control benefits by exploiting insider information and promoting selective transparency. Foreign investors, lacking such controlling benefit opportunities, tend to promote general transparency. Chapter 3 examines how the dynamics between family owners and market participants, such as analysts, market makers and investors determine a firm's overall transparency, using South Korean data between 2001 and 2007. Our results show that family ownership has a positive relation with earning-based transparency, while it has a negative relation with market-based transparency. As a result, family ownership seems to have no impact on overall transparency. However, an analysis based on sorting of family ownership shows that firms with less than 30% family ownership show a positive significant relation to overall transparency, but firms with family ownership of 30% or higher have an insignificant relation with overall transparency. This discrepancy may exist because family owners may want to promote corporate transparency through better earning-based information dissemination, but market participants discount such efforts and this discount increases as family ownership increases. / Business Administration/Finance

Corporate insiders frequently borrow from lending institutions and pledge personal equity shares as collateral for the loan. Using manually collected pledge data for January 2007-December 2011, I examine how this phenomena affects firm investors and analyze agency conflicts between pledging managers and (a) outside shareholders, and (b) bondholders. Pledging potentially influences investor risk through changing managerial incentives and/or contingency risk from ill-timed margin calls. Findings suggest influential insiders extract private benefits of control at the expense of outside shareholders through pledging. Difference-in-differences regressions utilizing an exogenous shock to lending supply indicate pledging corresponds with a 9.9% relative increase in stock volatility – controlling for changes in fundamentals – and support a causal interpretation of the relation between pledging and equity risk. Despite apparently harming equity investors however, further analysis suggests pledging benefits bondholders, and corresponds with an economically and statistically significant reduction in yield spreads on corporate bonds. Robustness tests evidence reductions in risky financing when insiders pledge, corroborating the negative relation between pledging and cost of debt and consistent with mitigated agency conflicts between managers and bondholders. / Business Administration/Finance

This dissertation explores the relationship between governance quality, accumulated wealth, and organizational performance in U.S. nonprofits. Accumulated wealth in nonprofits has been previously shown to reduce overall support contributions because donors perceive less need for financial resources. Further, the absence of owners leads to weaker monitoring mechanisms and greater agency problems. Despite the size of the nonprofit sector (5.5% of GDP and 9% of employment), the impact of governance in organizations with accumulated wealth has not been studied much. Using recent data on governance practices at nonprofits reported on IRS Form 990’s and structural equation modeling/partial least squares analysis, this study finds that the strength of governance practices in nonprofits reduces the negative impact of accumulated wealth in Arts, Education, Environment, Health, Higher Education, Hospitals, Human Services, International, and Religious organizations. This paper demonstrates how agency theory and stakeholder theory complement each other when the nonprofit business model has a traditional revenue structure similar to its for-profit counterpart. For practitioners, it shows that combining a strong governing body, governing policies, compensation policies, and transparency policies, helps hold management accountable. This is necessary for the more efficient and effective execution of a nonprofit’s mission. / Business Administration/Finance

Yes / This study examines the impact of internal corporate governance mechanisms on insurance companies’ risk-taking in the UK context. The study uses a panel data of all listed insurance companies on FTSE 350 over the 2005-2014 period. The results show that the board size and board meetings are significantly and negatively related to risk-taking. In contrast, the results show that board independence and audit committee size are statistically insignificant, but negatively related to risk-taking. The findings are robust to alternative measures and endogeneities. Our findings have important implications for investors, managers, regulators of financial institutions and effectiveness of corporate governance reforms that have been pursued.