Introduction: Increased savings in funds has enforced the importance of the institutions. During the last 25 years they have augmented their ownership from 20 to 85 % of the Swedish stock exchange. Thereby the ownership becomes more and more financial, meaning that the return is the most crucial. In an article in Dagens Nyheter the president of the Swedish Shareholders Association and the president of Metall object to the institutional passivity which they consider being an important problem. Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to put the institutional passivity in perspective. Method: The study was made in three parts. First we studied four companies, two with passive ownership and two with active, in two different lines of business. Then we studied the ownership structure in companies with a negative profittrend. Finally we contacted different trust funds to get their opinion on owner passivity. Result: The first study showed no difference between the passively and the actively owned companies. Neither did our second study prove any link between performance and owner passivity. Concerning the trust funds they all said to be active why passivity was no problem since it did not exist. Conclusion: We think that all trust funds say they are active because they have to say so and that they in practice are more or less passive. From the result of our studies we conclude that institutional passivity seems to be no problem. We think the conflict causing this discussion could be between different ownergroups rather than between management and owner

During the past year it has been made possible to buy back a company’s outstanding stock. This is done in order to change the capital structure towards a situation with less equity. A change in capital structure means a change in the cost of capital for a company and by that a change in the value for the stockholder. This Master Thesis studies the relation between capital structure and business risk. Studying the debt to equity ratio in a company captures capital structure. Studying the volatility in return on assets over a certain time period captures business risk. The Master Thesis also includes a study of what factors have an impact on the business risk when looking at the day-to-day business. By conducting a study of the pulp and paper industry and its nine listed companies a picture is created of what factors have an impact on the relation between capital structure and business risk. The business risk is in a very high degree dependant on factors like economic development for the product, raw material prices, number of product groups and what segments the company penetrates. A positive relation between capital structure and business risk has been identified. The study also indicates that other factors than just the business risk should be hold responsible for a company’s capital structure.

Background: As a result of the financial markets ever ongoing product innovation a new derivative was introduced in the USA in 1997. A derivative that derived it's value, not from the price of an underlying asset, but instead from a climate factor. It's been known for a long time that revenue in certain industries are affected by weather conditions. The suppliers of weather derivatives claim that these weather sensitive businesses can user weather derivatives in order to lessen weather risk. Purpose: To do a critical evaluation of how weather derivatives can be used by companies as a risk management tool. Results & Realization: The usefulness of weather derivatives have been evaluated by studies of the effect on the revenue of constructed example businesses in different situations andby using different types of weather derivatives. A collection of problems related to weather derivatives have been collected from the existing theoretical framework on weather derivatives. This thesis offers an in dept description of how different types of weather derivatives function and how they can be used by business in order to reduce weather risk. We conclude that weather derivatives do perform a function as a risk management tool. Although it's important that the end is aware of the problems concerning weather derivatives in order to be able to manage weather risk in a proper fashion.

Bakgrund: Företag är beroende av en mängd olika intressenter som alla har ett behov av att de tillgångar som redovisas är korrekt värderade Detta gäller inte minst fastighetsbolag vars tillgångsmassa till största del består av fastigheter vilka ligger till grund för värderingen av bolaget. RR 17 innebär att företagen inför varje rapporttillfälle måste göra en bedömning av sina tillgångar och när det redovisade värdet överstiger återvinningsvärdet ska det skrivas ned. Rekommendationen är mycket omfattande och innehåller bland annat riktlinjer för hur beräkning av återvinningsvärdet ska ske. Syfte: Syftet med uppsatsen är att utifrån ett redovisningsperspektiv genomföra en kritisk granskning av RR 17. Tillvägagångssätt: Här redogör vi för varför vi valt fastigheter. Vi beskriver hur vi har sökt information, gjort urval bland bolag och personer samt hur vi har lagt upp och genomfört våra intervjuer. Vi avslutar kapitlet med kritik mot det sätt vi valt att utföra granskningen på. Resultat: Vi anser att det är bra när ett värde har hög relevans men att det inte får ökas på bekostnad av lägre objektivitet. Vår egen åsikt som externa bedömare är att tillförlitligheten inte har ökat. Införandet av RR 17 har inte medfört att bolagen har fått ökade kostnader. Vi tycker att det råder brist på precision i underlaget för nedskrivning.