This paper aims to investigate the change in corporate debt levels in South Africa from 1994 to 2016, included is an analysis of factors that firms take into consideration when determining the company’s capital structure. This study uses data from firms in the Real Estate and REIT, Travel and Leisure and Construction and Materials sectors listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE). Four different leverage measures are used to determine the change in capital structure for the period under review, as well as six of the most commonly used determinants of capital structure. A high level interpretation of the results reflected the following; an increase in the use of debt in the Travel and Leisure and Construction and Materials Sectors, however a significant decrease in the use of debt relative to equity was seen in the Real Estate and REIT Sector thus skewing the Total Sample findings considerably. An increase in the use of long term debt relative to short term was also found. Results from the analysis of the capital structure determinants varied, with some determinants showing statistical significance. The following determinants were positively related to debt; firm size, asset tangibility and growth while the determinants; cost of debt and tax had a negative relationship. The relationship between profitability and leverage was varied.

Since the last financial crisis banks have been more restrictive about lending to companies, leading to companies seeking alternative funding. In this thesis we evaluate the Swedish market for property-related lending focusing on corporate bonds. We investigate if the view on corporate bonds differ between real estate companies and banks and also the development of the Swedish market for property-related lending. The thesis is based on interviews with people in the real estate- and bank industry as well as previous research. The Swedish bond market is undeveloped but it is going through a growing stage. In Swedish history banks have played an important roll developing the Swedish economy thus the Swedish financial market is bank dominated. Because of new bank regulations after the financial crisis, the price on loans went up leading to companies seeking alternative financing. This has led to an increase in corporate bonds issued by real estate companies. There has been an increase in the number of real estate companies issuing bonds as more investors, such as funds, have entered the bond market leading to an opportunity for smaller real estate companies to successfully issue bonds. / Efter senaste finanskrisen har banker blivit mer restriktiva med utlåning till företag, vilket har lett till att företag söker alternativ finansiering. I den här uppsatsen granskar vi den svenska marknaden för fastighetsrelaterad utlåning med fokus på obligationslån. Vi undersöker om synen på obligationslån skiljer sig mellan banker och fastighetsbolag samt hur den svenska kreditmarknaden för fastighetsrelaterad utlåning utvecklas. Uppsatsen bygger på intervjuer med personer i fastighets- och bankbranschen samt tidigare forskning om ämnet. Den svenska obligationsmarknaden är outvecklad men på stark tillväxt. Bankerna har historiskt sett haft en central roll i svenska näringslivet vilket har lett till att den svenska finansiella marknaden är bankdominerad. Efter finanskrisen har dock företag sökt alternativa finansieringsmöjligheter på grund av skärpta krav på banker som lett till dyrare lån för företagen. Detta har lett till att antal emitterade obligationer för företag inom fastighetsbranschen ökat. Fler och fler emittenter tar sig in på obligationsmarknaden i samband med att nya investerare, exempelvis kreditfonder, äntrat marknaden vilket har skapat möjlighet för även mindre fastighetsbolag att framgångsrikt emittera obligationer.

Thesis (M.Com. (Accounting)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / For organisations to be successful, they need key stakeholders like shareholders, customers, employees, banks and the community. These stakeholders are essential in any profit-based organisation. All stakeholders have needs, which have to be balanced. However, it is difficult to balance the needs of different stakeholders as they have different preferences. This study seeks to determine how different needs of stakeholders can be balanced and which of these stakeholders an organisation can prioritise to create value in the organisation. The study used a quantitative method to extract secondary data from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The judgemental sampling method was utilised to selected 68 organisations from the JSE, which were utilised to determine which stakeholder has an impact on the value of an organisation. The study did not choose any industry but generalised. The results of the study indicate that shareholders, customers and banks (debtholders) have no effect on the financial performance of the organisation. This means that stakeholders do improve value in an organisation. However, the results further revealed that the community and employees have a positive influence on financial performance. Future researchers can choose one industry to determine how these particular stakeholders influence the financial performance of organisations in a particular industry. In addition, more stakeholders can be identified that are key to organisations. / National Research Fund through Risk and Vulnerability Science Centre

Низкий уровень инновационного развития РФ и малое количество венчурных сделок обуславливает необходимость в комплексной оценке стартапа. Целью магистерской диссертации является разработка методики экономической оценки стартапов в сфере образовательных технологий. Анализ основывался на изучении научно-периодической литературы, изучении существующих методик оценки стартапа и степень их использования на венчурном рынке. В качестве источников информации использовались база публикаций Российского индекса научного цитирования, представленная на ресурсе Elibrary, данные корпоративной статистики по тематике исследования, внутренние документы исследуемого стартапа. В ходе написания магистерской диссертации была разработана и апробирована методика экономической оценки стартапа в сфере образовательных технологий. Использование разработанного инструментария нацелено на проведение комплексной оценки внутренних и внешних возможностей стартапа с целью принятия решения об инвестировании. Апробация разработанной методики позволила рассчитать ключевые экономические метрики стартапа, комплексно определив внешний и внутренний потенциал бизнеса с учетом особенностей сферы образовательных технологий. / The low level of innovative development in the Russian Federation and the small number of venture transactions necessitates a comprehensive assessment of startups. The purpose of the master's thesis is to develop a methodology for the economic evaluation of startups in the field of educational technologies. The analysis was based on the study of scientific periodical literature, the study of existing methods for evaluating a startup and the degree of their use in the venture capital market. As the source of information were used the base of publications of the Russian Science Citation Index, presented on the Elibrary; corporate statistics data on the research topic; internal documents of the investigated startup. During the writing of the master's thesis there was developed and tested method of economic evaluation of a startup in the field of educational technologies. The use of the developed toolkit is aimed at carrying out a comprehensive assessment of the internal and external capabilities of a startup in order to make an investment decision. The approbation of the developed method allowed to calculate the key economic metrics of the startup, comprehensively determining the external and internal potential of the business, taking into account the features of the sphere of educational technologies.

No description available.

Background: Family firms represent the majority of firms worldwide, and are regarded as a crucial part of the global economy. Despite that, there is little known about their objectives of financial reporting i.e how they use, produce and value their financial reports. In accounting literature two objectives of financial reporting are presented, a stewardship objective and a decision usefulness objective. Previous research within family business have found that family firms differ from non-family firms and that family firms utilize socioemotional wealth protection as a main reference point when making decisions.  Purpose: This study aims to provide an understanding of how family firms perceive the objective of their financial reporting and how this is shaped by SEW. Method: The study was conducted using a qualitative method and implemented through semi-structured interviews. Nine family firms participated in the study, where eight family members were interviewed and two non-family members.  Conclusion: The result suggest that four out of the five FIBER dimensions (of SEW), family influence and control, identification of family members with the firm, binding social ties and emotional attachment influence the family firm's objective of their financial reports. Meanwhile, for the fifth dimension, renewal of family bonds to the firm through dynastic succession, our study suggests that future successions do not have an influence on the family firm's perceived objective of financial reporting.

In Sweden, the demand for official credit ratings has historically not been as substantial as in other parts of the world. This due to the fact that Swedish banks up until recently provided the market with shadow ratings. The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) started investigating shadow ratings in August 2016 and decided that Nordic banks issuing shadow ratings were against the new directives because they were not registered as rating agencies. The Nordic corporate bond market has grown rapidly since the financial crisis and many bond issuers have avoided the organizational cost associated with obtaining and maintaining a credit rating. In 2016, more than half of Nordic bonds were issued without a credit rating, while today, the majority of Nordic bonds are issued with credit rating. Capital structure and specifically the goal of locating the optimal capital structure has, since the breakthrough of Modigliani and Miller in 1958, been the center of attention for a lot of research and the issue is of great interest for both academicians and practitioners. In practice, there are many factors that affect the decision of what leverage and capital structure a company decides to aim for. Among the factors are growth opportunities, firm size and profitability. With the base in corporate financial theory, the purpose of this study is to explore what factors that influence Swedish real estate companies regarding their decisions of capital structure and credit rating. With the method of semi-structured interviews and quantitative simulations, the study aims to understand why Swedish real estate companies are divided in their strategies about credit ratings and to explore if the firms have suboptimal credit ratings with respect to their capital structure. The quantitative part indicates that the optimal credit rating grade is A- with regard to the capital structure, for the examined Swedish real estate firms, under the current market conditions. The uncertainty of the optimal credit rating grade is displayed in a sensitivity analysis. The qualitative part of the study indicates that the rating of A- could plausibly be the optimal credit rating level and that it most likely is above the investment grade. The qualitative part further sheds light on the strategies of Swedish real estate firms and gives the market and investors insight to understand the underlying factors for why firms aim for different ratings. One can conclude that leverage and weighted average cost of capital are important factors when it comes to decisions regarding credit rating grades, but is often trumped by the quality label of credit ratings, the demand for different grades, the signals a upgrade/downgrade sends to the market and the possibility to reach the rating institutes requirements. / I Sverige har efterfrågan på officiella kreditbetyg historiskt sett inte varit lika stor som i andra delar av världen. Detta på grund av att svenska banker fram till nyligen försåg marknaden med skuggratings. Europeiska värdepappers- och marknadsmyndigheten (ESMA) började undersöka skuggratings i augusti 2016 och beslutade att nordiska banker som utfärdade skuggratings gick emot de nya direktiven eftersom de inte var registrerade som kreditvärderingsinstitut. Den nordiska obligationsmarknaden har vuxit snabbt sedan finanskrisen och många fastighetsbolag har undvikit kostnader kopplade till att erhålla och underhålla ett kreditbetyg. Under 2016 emitterades mer än hälften av nordiska obligationer utan kreditbetyg, medan idag är de flesta nordiska obligationer emitterade med kreditbetyg. Kapitalstruktur och specifikt målet att hitta den optimala kapitalstrukturen har sedan Modigliani och Millers genombrott 1958 varit centrum för mycket forskning och frågan är av stort intresse för både akademiker och utövare. I praktiken finns det många faktorer som påverkar beslutet om vilken belåningsgrad och kapitalstruktur som ett företag bestämmer sig för. Bland de påverkande faktorerna är tillväxtmöjligheter, företagsstorlek och lönsamhet. Med utgångspunkt i företagsfinansiella teorier, är syftetmed denna studie att undersöka vilka faktorer som påverkar svenska fastighetsbolag beträffande deras beslut om kapitalstruktur och kreditbetyg. Med metod i form av semistrukturerade intervjuer och kvantitativa simuleringar syftar studien till att förstå varför svenska fastighetsbolag har olika strategier kring kreditbetyg, samt att undersöka om företagen har suboptimala kreditbetyg med hänsyn till deras kapitalstruktur. Den kvantitativa delen indikerar att det optimala kreditbetyget är A-, med hänsyn till kapitalstruktur för de undersökta svenska fastighetsföretagen, under nuvarande marknadsförhållanden. Osäkerheten kring det optimala kreditbetyget visas i en känslighetsanalys. Den kvalitativa delen av studien indikerar att A- troligtvis kan vara den optimala kreditbetygsnivån samt att den optimala nivån högst sannolikt ligger över investment grade. Den kvalitativa delen belyser även de svenska fastighetsbolagens strategier och förser marknaden och investerare med insyn om de bakomliggande faktorerna till varför företag strävar efter olika betyg. Slutsatsen är att belåningsgrad och kapitalkostnader är viktiga faktorer när det gäller beslut om kreditbetyg, men att det ofta prioriterars efter kvalitén associerad med kreditbetyget, efterfrågan på olika kreditbetyg, signalerna en uppgradering / nedgradering sänder till marknaden och om företaget kan nå kreditvärderingsinstitutets krav.

In recent years, markets have evolved due to the disruption of digital marketplaces, and the rise of concerns about fairness, accountability and privacy. These changes have introduced new challenges for market designers. In this dissertation, we study the design and optimization of different markets. For each market, we provide a theoretical framework to analyze current solutions. Furthermore, we propose alternative solutions and identify the trade-offs between efficiency and other goals. In the first part of this dissertation, we study markets where tickets for a shared experience are allocated through a lottery. A group of agents is successful if and only if its members receive enough tickets for everyone. We study the efficiency and fairness of existing lottery mechanisms and propose practical alternatives. If agents must identify the members of their group, a natural solution is the Group Lottery, which orders groups uniformly at random and processes them sequentially. We show that the Group Lottery is approximately fair and approximately efficient. If agents may request multiple tickets without identifying members of their group, the most common mechanism is the Individual Lottery, which orders agents uniformly at random and awards each their request until no tickets remain. This approach can yield arbitrarily unfair and inefficient outcomes. As an alternative, we propose the Weighted Individual Lottery, in which the processing order is biased against agents with large requests. This simple modification makes the Weighted Individual Lottery  approximately fair and approximately efficient, and similar to the Group Lottery when there are many more agents than tickets. The second part of the dissertation focuses on markets in which an organization is presented with a set of individuals and must choose which subset to accept. The organization makes a selection based on a priority ranking of individuals as well as other observable characteristics. We propose the outcome based selection rules, which are defined by a collection of feasible selections and a greedy processing algorithm. For these rules, we (i) provide an axiomatic characterization, (ii) show that it chooses the only selection that respects priorities, and (iii) identify several cases where is efficient (choose the feasible selection with the highest value). Finally, we connect these ideas with the Chilean Constitutional Assembly election, and show that the rule that was implemented in practice is an outcome based selection rule. In the third part of this work, we study digital marketplaces where an online platform maximizes its revenue by influencing consumer buying behavior through the disclosure of information. In this market, consumers need to engage in a costly search process to acquire additional information. We develop a new model that combines a Bayesian persuasion problem with an optimal sequential search framework inspired by Weitzman's 1979. We characterize the platform's optimal policy under the assumption that the platform must provide a certain level of disclosure to incentivize the consumer to investigate. The optimal policy uses a binary signal indicating whether the item is a good match for the consumer or not. Additionally, we provide a conjecture on the platform's optimal policy when the assumption is relaxed and there are only two items. The structure of the optimal policy depends on the consumer's prior beliefs about the items and how they compare with the value of the outside option. However, in all scenarios, the optimal signals are either binary or uninformative. This conjecture is supported by a numerical analysis performed on a novel formulation based on quadratic programming.

Given ongoing advocacy for the institutionalisation of derivatives trading in sub- Saharan Africa (SSA) as a convenient way for enhancing regional countries’ growth prospects, this study examines the impact of derivatives trading on the economy of South Africa, with reference to output growth and growth volatility, in order to illustrate the likely developmental impact that derivatives markets could ensue for SSA countries. The literature of the study essentially explores the possible ways of derivatives markets’ influence on economic growth, alongside the infrastructural requirements for ensuring well-functioning derivatives markets. While accounting for implied capital market development, the GMM estimation could not evidence a significant relationship between the existing derivatives exchange and real GDP growth using South Africa’s data. Similarly, a causal relationship from SAFEX’s trading volumes to GDP growth could not be inferred. However, the study shows evidence of the reducing effect of derivatives trading on growth volatility. / Business Management / M. Com. ( Business Management)

Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2000. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The relationship between asset markets and economic growth is well documented in economic literature. Harvey (1989), conducted a study of the relationship between interest rate spreads, share market prices and real economic growth in the USA. He developed a model to forecast real economic growth using interest rate spreads and share market prices and concluded that interest rate spreads produced superior forecasts to those based on share market information. He further established that the forecasts obtained from his simple model, which made no provision for serial correlation, compared favourably with those of leading economic forecasters in the USA. Van der Mescht (1991) undertook a similar study based on interest rate spreads and share market prices in South Africa. He concluded that there were no significant differences between the capital market and share market as predictors of economic growth in South Africa when provision was made in Harvey's model for the effects of serial correlation. His results indicated that both the capital and share markets were able to explain more than 65 percent of the variation in economic growth over the period of his study and that the forecasts were able to accurately predict the turning points in the economy and compared favourably with other leading economic forecasters. A similar study to Van der Mescht's using updated South African data found that in general the conclusions reached by Van der Mescht remain valid. A difference which is evident, however, is that, whereas previously, there was little difference between the results of the interest rate spread and share market index model, the interest rate spread model produced better results over the period of this study (1981 - 1998). / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die verwantskap tussen die kapitaal- en aandelemark en ekonomiese groei is deeglik in die ekonomiese literatuur ge-dokumenteer. Harvey (1989) het navorsing gedoen oor die verwantskap tussen die termynstruktuur van rentekoerse, aandelepryse en reële ekonomiese groei in die VSA. Hy het 'n vooruitskattingsmodel ontwikkel vir ekonomiese groei, gebaseer op die termynstruktuur van rentekoerse en aandelepryse en het tot die gevolgtrekking gekom dat die termynstruktuur van rentekoerse 'n beter vooruitskatter van ekonomiese groei is as die aandelemark, en dat sy model, wat geen voorsiening vir outokorrelasie maak nie, goed vergelyk met ander ekonometriese modelle wat ekonomiese groei in die VSA vooruitskat. Van der Mescht (1991) het 'n soortgelyke studie, gebaseer op die termynstruktuur van rentekoerse en aandelepyse in Suid Afrika, onderneem. Hy het tot die gevolgtrekking gekom dat daar geen betekenisvolle verskil is tussen die kapitaal en aandelemark as vooruitskatters van ekonomiese groei indien daar vir outokorrelasie in die modelle voorsiening gemaak word nie. Sy resultate dui aan dat die kapitaal- en aandelemark meer as 65 persent van die persentasieverandering in die ekonomiese groei kon verklaar oor die termyn van sy studie, dat dit akkurate vooruitskattings van die draaipunte in die Suid Afrikaanse ekonomie gelewer het, en dat dit gunstig vergelyk met ander ekonomiese vooruitskatters. 'n Soortgelyke studie as die van Van der Mescht is onderneem, met die jongste inligting omtrent termynstruktuur van rentekoerse en aandelepryse in Suid Afrika. In die algemeen is die gevolgtrekkings van Van der Mescht steeds van toepassing. Daar is egter aangetoon dat, waar daar voorheen geen betekenisvolle verskil tussen die kapitaal- en aandelemark as vooruitskatters van ekonomiese groei was nie, die termynstruktuur van rentekoerse beter resultate oor die termyn van hierdie studie gelewer het. (1981 -1998).