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<p>One of the newest emerging areas of research in supply chain management is ReverseLogistics. It involves all activities related to the flow of products from the customerback to the supplier. In the last decade scholars have developed theories and models,however empirical data is still in its infancy. In response, this paper strives to close thisgap by conducting research to create new knowledge on the first element of reverselogistics, which is the product return process. The main intention of having a returnprocess is to handle returned products efficiently in order to recover value and to savecosts. Therefore, it is a value-adding operation and can become profitable for thecompany.The purpose of this study is to investigate the implementation and perception of thereturn process of Swedish e-retailers. Sweden is considered to be one of the mostmatured e-commerce markets. In addition, e-retailers experience the highest rate ofproduct returns. Together those two factors influenced the decision to dedicate thisthesis to this particular region and industry.Initially, this paper introduces reverse logistics focusing specifically on the productreturn process. An overview of the existing theories and concepts within the returnprocess is presented and summarized, resulting in the creation of the Boomerang ReturnModel. Based on this foundation the questionnaire was created. By cooperating with theSwedish e-retail federation - Svensk Distanshandel, access to the industry was gained toperform a quantitative study.It was found that the empirical data only gives insight into the implementation andperception of the return process of small sized companies. The findings demonstrate thelimited awareness of the importance of an efficient return process. Companies tend toperceive the return process as unimportant instead of value adding. Hence, there is anopportunity for improvements in the Swedish e-retail market. From these findings amodified version of the Boomerang Return Model was created to adjust the initialmodel particularly for small sized companies. The model can be utilized as a theoreticalgroundwork in future research. Additionally, it could also serve as guidance for smallcompanies how to implement an appropriate return process.</p>

There is sparse research literature in agricultural economics regarding early weaning as a potential alternative production/marketing strategy. The objective of this research is to estimate and analyze the impacts on net returns of alternative weaning dates for Tennessee cow-calf operations including alternative post-weaning treatments for calves.The Decision Evaluator for the Cattle Industry (DECI) simulation program was used for this study to produce outputs such as calf numbers, gender, and weights, other output including cow weights and body condition score, both at calving and at weaning, and pregnancy percentages. Forty-two simulations were run for average and summer drought weather, weaning at an average age of 135, 165, 195, 225, 255, and 285 days and selling at weaning or after a 60 or 90-day drylot backgrounding period. Prices for steers, heifers, and culled cows from 1995-2008 were taken from market reports. Costs were derived from University of Tennessee Extension Beef and Forage Budgets and USDA-NASS. The outputs from DECI were combined with prices to result in total revenues. Subtracting the costs of feed, interest, veterinary and medical, and marketing resulted in return to land, labor, management, and risk to the enterprise. The results of this study revealed that under average weather conditions in East Tennessee, marketing at weaning in November yielded the highest net return. Weaning in August and backgrounding for 60 days yielded the lowest net return with the base 90-cow herd.Under summer drought conditions, marketing at weaning in August resulted in the highest net return. Weaning in November and marketing after a 90-day backgrounding period yielded the lowest net return.Under the conditions used in this study, the only time early weaning makes economic sense is when herd size is increased for June or July weaning or under drought conditions when August (195 days) weaning and sale is optimal. Several limitations of this study imply that additional research is required on this topic before definite conclusions can be drawn.

During the last decade, investments into the Swedish mutual fund market have increased substantially. The increased popularity of actively managed Swedish equity funds among households and investment companies, correspondingly, funds need to deliver substantial results, raised the importance to evaluate these funds’ performance. This thesis adds to the scarce empirical literature on Swedish equity mutual fund performance. Employing the Fama-French three factor model, it analyzes whether actively managed Swedish equity mu- tual funds outperform the Fama-French benchmarks net- and gross of management fees. The study uses time-series data and constructs equally-weighted portfolios of the 42 Swe- dish based actively managed equity mutual funds investing in Sweden for the period 2003- 2013. The portfolios’ excess returns are calculated by estimating the Fama-French three factor model by means of ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis. The empirical results show that actively managed equity mutual funds over performed the Fama-French three factor benchmarks by an average annualized net- and gross excess return of 3.60 and 4.67 percent respectively. Sorting out the funds by the performance into deciles, the find- ings indicate that management fees influence the performance of the equity mutual funds in the sample of our study. The conclusion is made such that there is an indication that Swedish equity funds’ managers are able to add value above passive investing.

During the previous years there has been a lot of focus on e-commerce in the fashion and clothing industry and that everything will be bought online in the future. However, several e-commerce companies have decided to expand into offline retail. This dissimilarity between theory and reality creates an interest for further research and a curiosity of how the future within retail will develop. The purpose of this research is to understand why Swedish online fashion retailers expand through an offline strategy. An Expansion Theme Model, which emerged from the theoretical framework, is used throughout the research to create a cohesive presentation of the material. In this research two case studies were conducted with e-commerce companies that are moving towards offline retail, one that is planning to open their own offline store and the other that is selling to external offline retailers. The findings present the reasons for expanding into offline retail according to the respondents in the two cases. Two reasons that were discussed in both cases were to enhance the brand image and use offline retailing as a marketing tool to reach a larger customer group and ultimately enhance the company’s profit. The findings present several problems within each case that can be solved by expanding into offline retail. The first problem is about suppliers that protect offline retailers. The second problem is about how to reach the minimum quantities that the suppliers require. The third problem is how to achieve a better negotiation power with the suppliers. The fourth problem discusses the challenge of displaying products online. The view of the future within retail is also presented, where all of the respondents agreed that the two selling channels will be more integrated in the future. Finally, the transition towards offline retail creates many new possibilities in the world of retail that is yet undiscovered and it is therefore exciting to follow this development.

People with insight are known as insiders and they often have access to information which have not yet been publiched. Previous research show that insiders can use their information leverage to assimilate abnormal returns. The purpose of this study is to examine whether insiders in a company can generate abnormal returns by trading shares in their own company. A quantitative methodology has ben practiced in order to achieve the desired result. Data has been collected through Finansinspektionen about the insider trades on the Swedish stock market. We have further used an event study to calculate both the expected and also the abnormal return in order to answer our research issue. The results given from this study show significant abnormal returns when insiders trade with shares in their own company. / Aktier medför ett placeringsalternativ med en viss risk och ger investerare möjligheten att generera en avkastning på sin portfölj. Personer som anses ha tillgång till förtrolig samt kurspåverkande information inom ett företag betecknas som insynspersoner. Tidigare forskning visar att insynspersoner kan utnyttja detta informationsövertag i sin egen vinning för att tillgodogöra sig överavkastning. Syftet med denna studie är att granska huruvida insynspersoner kan generera en viss överavkastning gentemot andra aktörer på marknaden. I denna forskning har en kvantitativ metod tillämpats med en deduktiv ansats. Via Finansinspektionens insynslista kan vi detektera transaktioner genomförda av insiders för att sedan, med användandet av en eventstudie, besvara forskningsfrågan, om insynspersoner kan generera en överavkastning. Hypotesprövningar ligger sedan till grund för att bedöma huruvida resultatet påvisar signifikans. Utifrån denna studie kan vi dra slutsatsen om att nollhypotesen bör förkastas, således menar vi att det förekommer en signifikant överavkastning i samband med att insynspersoner bedriver handel på värdepappersmarknaden.

This dissertation examines a profit-maximizing project selection and scheduling problem. Assume that a set of potentially profitable projects are available, yet limited available resources may not allow all of them to be pursued. Profit profiles for projects are assumed to be non-increasing functions of project completion times, i.e. profit returns are sensitive to time-to-market. Decision needs to be made on which sub-set of projects should be chosen and how resources should be allocated to these projects such that the total profit is maximized.Formal mathematical models are formulated for various versions of the problem, including such ones incorporating a third team formation aspect. Structure of the problem is examined and insights are gained regarding prioritization of project, specifically. Although prioritization is sub-optimal in general, heuristic solution methods based on prioritization are pursued, since the scheduling sub-problem itself is NP-hard.A decomposition heuristic framework is first proposed to obtain good solutions using minimum computational time. Sets of test instances are generated using project network data from well-known source in the literature. Computational runs reveal that three priority rules achieve significantly better profits than the benchmarking random priority rule.Improving upon the prioritization based decomposition heuristic, an implicit enumeration is proposed. This algorithm does not examine all priority sequences, yet guarantees an optimal priority sequence when the computation is completed. Several fathoming rules are proposed to cut back computational time effectively. Comparison to the profits achieved by the best priority rule and the benchmarking random priority rule shows a significant improvement on profits, yet at a cost of reasonable added computation time.Future research areas include identifying general conditions under which prioritization of projects would lead us to an optimal solution. Developing better upper bounds for the implicit enumeration scheme is also of interest. The team formation aspect has yet to be treated computationally. It would also be of interest to consider how synergy deviation information may be fed back to the earlier stages of project selection and scheduling decision. Trade-off between profit and team synergy may also be considered in the future.

This paper explores the relationship between lagged stock returns and export growth in a panel of worldwide markets. Previous studies have focused on analyzing the effect of future economic output growth on stock returns. This study finds that annualized changes in a foreign country’s exports to the United States five to seven years in the future, defined as long-term, positively predict the annual stock market returns while the nation’s total export changes are already priced-in. An additional percentage point increase in long-term exports to the United States growth results in a 0.1 to 3.5 percentage point rise in annual stock returns. However, both growth in total exports and those to the United States do not predict equity returns over the short-term, defined as average annual growth from year 0 to year 4. Thus, establishing a foothold and cracking the highly competitive and homogeneous United States market is not guaranteed and unpredictable, requiring 5 years of investments before successful foreign firms are able convert it into earnings. Alternatively, investors may be shortsighted, uninformed, and pay limited attention about a foreign country’s exports to the United States beyond their forecast horizon, for example, five years. Moreover, the analysis finds that GDP growth at both the foreign country and United States level does not affect lagged foreign stock returns and could be priced-in, unlike long-term growth in the nation’s exports to United States.

The paper presents a formal analysis which incorporates returns to transportation into a Ricardian framework to predict trade patterns. The important point to be gained from this analysis is that increasing returns to transportation, coupled with appropriate distances between trading partners can be shown to reverse Ricardian predictions even when there are no international differences in tastes, technology, or factor endowments. Additional gains from trade may emerge from reductions in aggregate delivery costs owing to scale economies. (authors' abstract) / Series: Discussion Papers of the Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience

The earnings game and myopic performance focus induce managers to use judgment and influence to alter the reported earnings. Earnings management is the umbrella term for such manipulative actions, by accruals management or real activates management. The implicit market reactions by the stock returns indicate the effect of EM and if the behaviors are opportunistic or informative for the stakeholders. Accounting variables explain less of the stock return variation and speculative short-term news drives the variation of stock return. Research Question: Can earnings management indicators improve the forecasting of stock returns? The main purpose of the study is to investigate whether EM can be utilized to forecast returns from improving the forecasting of earnings. The authors will include both AM and RAM measures to investigate the different inherent forecasting abilities, adding to the asset pricing research and valuation area. The authors aim to enhance the explanation of cross-sectional variation of stock returns from accounting variables. The authors aim to develop a model more specified to explain the future stock returns from the accounting relationships. An additional purpose is to include transactions with the firm (stock repurchases) to potentially increase the signaling value of the manipulation behaviors. The theoretical framework consists of a discussion of theories and empirical findings regarding the accounting characteristic and relationship with stock returns. Earnings management is explained in-depth along with the empirical findings related to the concept. The capital market perspective is explained by the efficient market and behavioral finance. The chapter is concluded by concepts explaining the relationship and explanations for earnings management and the impact of information. The sample consists of 3545 firms from NASDAQ and NYSE for the years 1992-2012, which equates to around 40 000 observations. We utilize 11 different EM indicators, constructed to capture abnormal components which indicate manipulative actions. The EM indicators’ association with future stock returns is tested by yearly and industry-yearly firm characteristics framework regressions. The firm characteristic framework is developed to control for firm characteristics and evaluate the standalone effect of EM. The result is expanded by investigating earnings persistence, correlations, robust regression and portfolio sorts. The results suggest that total accruals, discretionary accruals, unexpected core earnings, production cost and stock returns are associated with subsequent stock returns. Abnormal SG&amp;A expenses, Abnormal R&amp;D expenses and abnormal cash flows from operations are not associated with stock returns. Earnings are downward manipulated prior and during stock repurchases. The change in ATO and PM diagnostic captures AM but not RAM. The concluding remarks are that EM indicators are associated with future stock returns and improve the forecasting of stock returns via a more accurate forecast of earnings.