Syfte: Syftet med denna uppsats är att studera om förändringar i arbetet med rörelsekapital hade ett samband med lönsamheten i företag. Som mått på rörelsekapital används Cash Conversion Cycle och som mått på lönsamhet används ROA. Teoretiskt perspektiv: Den teoretiska referensramen består av teorier om Working Capital Management, Cash Conversion Cycle, Lean, Supply Chain Management och Supply Chain Finance. Metod: I denna uppsats används en kvantitativ metod där sekundärdata samlas in från årsredovisningar för 2005 och 2013. Denna data ligger till grund för fyra korrelationsanalyser. Den beroende variabeln i korrelationsanalyserna är ROA och defyra oberoende variablerna är Cash Conversion Cycle, dagar i lager, dagar som kundfordring och dagar som leverantörsskuld. Urvalet i denna studie består av svenska aktiebolag inom branschen tillverkning och industri med fler än 50 anställda. Empiri: Empirin består av fyra tabeller som presenterar de beräkningar som gjorts. Slutsats: Sambandet mellan förändring i Cash Conversion Cycle och förändring i ROA blev väldigt svagt positivt men inte signifikant. Alla förändringar i dagar i lager, dagar som kundfordring och dagar som leverantörsskuld visade svaga negativa samband till ROA och var signifikanta.

This thesis aims to study whether cash flow ratios can predict corporate financial distress in Sweden by employing multiple discriminant analysis. It was inspired by the Altman Z-score, which was adjusted for this aim. This study adopted a positivist epistemology and objectivist ontology. The research approach taken was a deductive one which employed quantitative methods in testing the hypotheses developed. The hypotheses were tested through means of accuracy and the Independent Samples Test. In order to identify financial distress a proxyratio was adopted. This proxy was the operating cash flow ratio. The sample consisted of 227 firms in total within the retail- and service industries. The time period covered 2000-2013. It was found that the proxy was unable to separate firms into distressed and nondistressedgroups, but rather classified all firms as distressed. Furthermore, the other ratios also failed to do any classification. Therefore, what the question that this study set out to answer came to the conclusion; cash flow ratios cannot predict corporate financial distress for retail and service companies in Sweden.

The main aim of this paper is to measure the underground economy of India and to review previous attempts to do the same. In this paper I provide estimates of the size of the hidden economy of India for the period 1971 - 2004. Analysis on previous attempts is done with a focus on the dynamic multiple indicators multiple causes (DYMIMC) and the currency demand methods. I estimate the size of the Indian economy using indicator and causal variables chosen by Schneider, Chaudhuri and Chatterjee in their paper, “The Size and Development of the Indian Shadow Economy and a Comparison with other 18 Asian Countries: An Empirical Investigation”.

This study focuses on the effects of the cash for care policy (CFC, in Swedish vårdnadsbidrag) on female employment in Sweden. The CFC was introduced in Sweden in 2008. It consists of a flat-rate sum paid by the municipalities to parents of children between age one and three, who decide to provide care for their children and do not use publicly subsidized daycare. The policy has been the object of heated political and social debates. The main object of the reform is increasing parents’ “freedom to choose”, but the policy is also feared to be a “housewife trap” by those opposing the reform. The study provides an overview of the use of CFC during the first years since its introduction, and an estimate of short-term effects of the use of CFC on female employment. Since it is voluntary for the municipalities to adopt the policy, municipalities have been analyzed as in a quasi-experiment, where some have been “treated” with the CFC policy, and some have not. First, female employment trends in similar types of treated and control municipalities were compared. Secondly, linear regressions were used to estimate the effects of the CFC policy on changes in female employment rates after the introduction of the policy, controlling for various characteristics of the municipalities such as: urban/rural areas, shares of highly educated women, shares of low educated women, shares of foreign-born women, total fertility rates. The study shows that, in general, the municipalities that offered the policy had higher female employment rates than the municipalities that did not offer it. Nevertheless, in rural areas the adoption of CFC had negative effects on female employment. On average, in rural areas female employment growth rates relative to years 2007-2012 in municipalities offering the policy were 2.42 percentage points lower than in control municipalities, all else being equal. Negative effects of CFC on female employment in municipalities with high shares of low educated women, high shares of foreign-born women and high fertility rates were not confirmed. The CFC policy has been recently adopted, mostly in urban municipalities and the proportion of parents that used CFC has been relatively low. Long terms effects of CFC on female employment will likely be dependent on whether the policy will be more widely used in the future and where.

Internal control disclosures mandated by section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) are designed to provide information about a firm’s financial reporting quality and in doing so may offer information on firm-specific tax planning activities. Internal control weaknesses disclosed under SOX are frequently related to a firm’s tax function (Ge and McVay, 2005; Gleason, Pincus and Rego, 2010) and thus raise the question of whether or not these frequent problems affect corporate tax avoidance. In this thesis, I test hypotheses that tax-related disclosures, particularly those that contain company-level internal control weaknesses (ICWs), provide information with respect to long-run tax avoidance. Furthermore, I test hypotheses that the combination of internal control quality and aggressive tax avoidance aid in assessing shareholder returns. To conduct these tests, I collect and construct firm-level SOX disclosure data from 2004 to 2006 across 1,286 publicly-owned corporations. I begin with an empirical analysis of the association between tax avoidance and firm-level ICWs and generally find that the presence of tax ICWs and company-level tax ICWs constrain long-run tax avoidance. For firms with low cash constraints however, company-level tax ICWs appear to lead to an increase in tax avoidance. Nevertheless, subsequent analysis of monthly abnormal returns implies that the stock market reacts negatively to the disclosure of company-level tax ICWs, regardless of whether or not tax aggressiveness is also present. This thesis contributes to the literature by documenting the first evidence that internal control disclosures provide information regarding firm-level tax planning. Although the number of internal control weakness disclosures is decreasing over time, the availability of these SOX disclosures represents a previously unavailable opportunity to examine and further understand internal governance mechanisms within the firm and their influence on tax planning. In addition, this thesis further corroborates prior literature that argues for the importance of the pervasiveness of internal control weaknesses by showing that the pervasive, company-level tax internal control weaknesses are associated with tax avoidance and lower shareholder returns. Finally, my dissertation implies that the presence of tax internal control weaknesses constrains tax avoidance and thus a focus on improving internal controls could help improve the tax planning function. However, my firm-level analysis also implies that effective tax planning is a sustainable process and thus a firm and its stakeholders may require several periods before the full benefits of these improvements are realized.

This project is part of CATEA's RERC workplace accommodations grant, and it d research, develop, test and evaluate a retail checkout workstation that maximizes independence and participation of employees and increases their employment possibilities. Preliminary research shows that current designs of retail checkout workstations do not accommodate the intended employees including the seated and standing users. According to the research, factors like task design and ease of use have contributed to job loss and reduced employment. Through participatory research techniques and ergonomic studies, this project identified accessibility and usability needs and outline design guidelines of a retail workstation that would address these needs. Based on these guidelines and examining possible future retail checkout scenarios influenced by new trends and emerging technologies, future grocery retail checkout concepts were developed. These concepts try to address the need for wider accessibility and better interactions, while adding value through design that aims to increase job opportunities for people with disabilities provide a better experience for the end users and maximize store investment efficiency of front-end equipment.

Three Essays on Stock Market Seasonality Hyung-Suk Choi 136 pages Directed by Dr. Cheol S. Eun In chapter 1, we examine seasonality in returns to style portfolios, which serve as important benchmarks for asset allocation, and investigate its implications for investment. In doing so, we consider monthly returns on the style portfolios classified by six size/book-to-market sorting and six size/prior-return sorting over the sample period 1927 - 2006. The key findings are: first, as is well documented in the literature, small-cap oriented portfolios are subject to the January effect, but also to the 'negative' September and October effects. Second, cross-style return dispersion exhibits a seasonal pattern of its own (it is largest in January and smallest in August), suggesting possibly profitable trading strategies. Third, our seasonal strategies indeed yield significant profits, as high as about 18.7 % per annum. This profit is mostly attributable to the seasonal autocorrelation in style returns. Lastly, we find substantial seasonal patterns in style returns not only in the U.S. but also in other major stock markets Germany, Japan, and the U.K. Our seasonal style rotation strategy yields economically and statistically significant profits in all of these stock markets. In chapter 2, we examine the abnormal, negative stock returns in September which have received little attention from academic researchers. We find that in most of the 18 developed stock markets the mean return in September is negative and in 15 countries it is significantly lower than the unconditional monthly mean return. This September effect has not weakened in the recent period. Further, the examinations of the various style portfolios in the US market show that the September effect is the most pervasive anomalous phenomenon that is not affected by size, book-to-market ratio, past performance, or industry. Our finding suggests that the forward looking nature of stock prices combined with the negative economic growth in the last quarter causes the September effect. Especially in the fall season when most investors become more risk averse, the stock prices reflect the future economic growth more than the rest of the year. Our investment strategy based on the September effect yields a higher mean return and a lower standard deviation than the buy-and-hold strategy. In chapter 3, we establish the presence of seasonality in the cash flows to the U.S. domestic mutual funds. January is the month with the highest net cash flows to equity funds and December is the month with the lowest net cash flows. The large net flows in January are attributed to the increased purchases, and the small net flows in December are due to the increased redemptions. Thus, the turn-of-the-year period is the time when most mutual fund investors make their investment decisions. We offer the possible sources for the seasonality in mutual funds flows.

This thesis examines the relationship between equity valuation and four value drivers: revenue growth, volatility, profit margin and competitive advantage. It is motivated by evidence that the predominant valuation techniques of equity analysts are not associated with improved portfolio performance. Prior research suggests that equity analysts devote considerable resources into forecasting near-term earnings, but derive target prices from those earnings in an almost arbitrary fashion. In contrast, the valuation techniques in the commercial world are increasing in sophistication. Around 30 percent of large corporations in the United States and Australia use real options analysis for project evaluation, according to recent surveys. Thus, the research question is whether sophisticated equity valuation, based on rigorous economic assumptions, is useful for investment decision-making.

Protected areas are one of the main tourist attractions and home to many poor people living in and around them in many developing countries. Tourism development in such areas requires linking nature conservation with poverty elimination. Although attracting more concern, the actual benefits accessible to the local poor is inevitably neglected or misunderstood. This work identifies the correlation between tourism and poverty alleviation by tracing the cash flows to the local poor, review the social and environmental effects of tourism on the local area and establishes a community-based sustainable tourism-eliminating poverty strategy framework. The case study was conducted in a group of protected areas in the Qinling Mountain Region in Western China. The study focuses on local poor people, but does not exclude other stakeholders. Since the case study region is a typical representation of the combination and overlapping of the multiple needs for tourism development, poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation, which are faced by many other developing countries in the world, it is expected that the findings and recommendations can be applied to other regions in China, as well as other developing countries.

Univ., Diss.--Zürich, 2007.