This thesis has identified a gap in literature regarding the effects of quantitative easing (QE) on equities since the financial crisis in 2008. An event study has been conducted to investigate the portfolio rebalance effect stating that assets not regarded as close substitutes to targeted assets under the QE-scheme, e.g. equities, should respond with a lag to new information regarding QE. Also literature suggests that larger stocks should tend to lead smaller stocks. Assuming investors regard larger stocks as safer we aim to test the hypotheses that stocks will respond to QEannouncements containing new, unanticipated information and that larger, safer stocks will lead smaller, more volatile. The responses in the U.S. stock indices S&P 500, its corresponding sectors as well as mid and small cap indices are examined on nine identified events. Results show that stocks respond immediately on the day of a QE-announcement, but also that returns continue to increase the following days after. Also smaller, more volatile stocks have larger average abnormal returns compare to larger, less volatile stocks.

This paper explores how the five largest trading venues in the Nordic region compete after theimplementation of MiFID in November 2007. I investigate: (1) if NASDAQ OMX’s market sharehas increased post the introduction of major changes to its market structure, and (2) how anexchange operator can attract equity share order flow in the near future. By applying event studiesto NASDAQ OMX’s market share over time, I find that introducing a faster trading system andadmitting a high frequency trading firm as a member both have a negative impact on NASDAQOMX’s market share. The reductions in market share can be explained by high frequency tradingfirms’ trading behaviour. Introducing central counterparty clearing has a positive effect onNASDAQ OMX’s market share, which highlights market participants’ appreciation of a securetrading environment, and confirms that it is not only posting the best bid and ask quotes thatattracts order flow to an exchange. It can be concluded that NASDAQ OMX in the future needs toaddress an important trade-off between total turnover and market share, as the two are not alwayspositively correlated.

Background: The Covid-19 pandemic has been affecting the world in some or another way both when it comes to individuals and the adaption to a new lifestyle as well as economic and financial impacts on the global markets. The outbreak started off in China in the late 2019 and spread across every country in the world within three to four months. Living and working standards has since then changed due to restrictions with more people working from home and with impacts on the daily business of companies. The attention is brought upon the real estate sector because of the uncertainty followed by the new norms in societies which makes it an interesting sector on which to study the financial impact. Purpose: This paper aims to investigate how 13 chosen dates regarding the Covid-19 pandemic from announcements of the Swedish Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven and The Public Health Authority has affected the real estate sector in Sweden by using an event study approach. The dates were divided into three categories namely restrictions, work from home and financial support to see whether these specific announcements have a financial impact on Swedish real estate companies. Method: For this study, a deductive approach was applied along with the philosophy of positivism since this is most suitable for quantitative methods.  The event study methodology was used in order to observe the data on how the stock market in Sweden reacts on the impact of the outbreak concerning Covid-19 and how this might affect the real estate sector with the selected dates from the announcements. Conclusion: The findings from this study indicated that there were two significant results when calculating the abnormal returns for each individual company over all event dates with all others being not significant, since all other t-tests that were applied did not show strong enough results to provide significance concerning the real estate sector and the effects of Covid-19. Although, one should keep in mind that this is a short-term analysis and that in the long-term these results might differentiate, therefore, this thesis could be a guideline for future research when more data and information concerning the pandemic is available.

The main purpose of this study is to contribute to the previous literature by evaluating positive changes in analysts' consensus recommendations of the stocks listed in OMXS30. We analyze if new positive changes in consensus recommendations correspond with lower abnormal returns. By conducting an event study and performing a series of different statistical tests, we find that positive changes in analyst consensus provide a short lived negative mean abnormal return in certain cases. We argue that this implies that investors might interpret positive changes as a sell signal. Furthermore, we find some pieces of evidence to suggest that it may actually be changes in the mean target price rather than changes in recommendations that causes the movements in abnormal returns.

Abstract Title: Announcing an acquisition, what happens next? Authors: Carl Åkesson and Hasan Beslija Supervisor: Katarina Eriksson Background: Sweden is the Nordic region's largest market for M&A. Despite this, there is a limited research base for how acquisitions affect abnormal returns on the Swedish stock market. There is no consensus among previous studies on how the bidding firms are affected in the short run by acquisitions or how the abnormal return is affected by firm size and form of acquisition. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to investigate whether there is an abnormal return in the short run for bidding firms when announcing an acquisition and how it differs between different company sizes and different forms of acquisitions. Methodology: The study is of quantitative nature and has been conducted with a deductive approach. The research questions of this study have been chosen with previous studies in mind. Furthermore, the study has used two methods; event study and regression analysis. In addition to these methods, tests have been carried out with the aim of statistically ensuring the abnormal return that has arisen in the event study. Results: The results of the study show that an announcement of an acquisition leads to a negative average cumulative abnormal return in the short run. For the different company sizes, large cap has the most negative average cumulative abnormal return. For the various acquisition forms, horizontal acquisitions have the most negative average cumulative abnormal return. The study's regression analysis show that company size and acquisition form have a low degree of explanation for the emergence of abnormal returns. Keywords: Abnormal returns, acquisitions, event study, cumulative abnormal return

Background: Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are two types of corporate takeover strategy, that is widely used for strengthening and maintaining a firm competitive advantage in both domestic and global markets. Where the common motives behind M&A, is to achieve business expansion through synergy, or to acquire an existing external technology/product outside of a firm's own operational territory. As the world has entered an era of information and globalization, where innovation seems to prosper and different industry markets have become ever more integrated on a global scale, not least in the software industry. Hence, more firms have resorted to M&A in order to survive in a modern competitive market. For example, to capture more market shares, boost productivity, cut development costs, improve investment returns, etc. Nevertheless, the integration process of M&A carries lots of risks, where there is lots of different factors that needs to be considered and discussed before adopting M&A strategies. Such as, what industry are the involving firm operating in, which country are the involving firm located in, and what economic impacts can be triggered by M&A announcements. However, there are currently lack of literatures investigating the economic impacts of M&A announcements across different industries. That is, depending on if the firms are operating within or outside of the same industry, the economic impacts of the M&A announcement might differ. Objectives: The objective of this thesis is to analyze the market reactions generated from M&A announcements, and determine if the economic impacts will be greater if a software target firm is merged/acquired by a software or non-software acquiring firm. Methods: A quantitative statistical event study has been used as the main methodology in this thesis. Which is a standard method to analyze market reaction, that is in this case represented by financial stock market data. Following the event study, a multiple regression analysis was conducted in order to explain the event study, by examine the economic impact on the abnormal return derived from M&A announcements. Results: The result from the event study disclosed that target firms tends to experience more positive abnormal returns, while acquiring firms will experience negative abnormal returns during M&A announcements. The results of the multiple regression analysis, revealed various significant variables that has high explanatory power to the abnormal return. Conclusions: Based on the empirical results, the greatest economic impact could be identified during an M&A announcement that involves a cooperative partnerships deals between software target firms and non-software acquiring firms. Furthermore, acquiring firms tends to offer a higher premium to target firms during M&A transactions. This in turn indicates that acquiring firms will statistically receive less abnormal returns compared to target firms. Delimitations: Due to the wide-ranging scope of an event study that has many diverse adoptions areas to explore, the author decided to make some demarcations in this thesis. In particular, this thesis will be focusing on analyzing stock price movements prior and during M&A announcements. In addition, certain factors/variables that can potentially generate a significant economic impact during M&A announcements will be investigated. Hence, other aspects that are related or may affect M&A transactions itself, will scarcely be discussed or even excluded from this study.

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Product placements are gaining more importance in corporate marketing communication budgets and marketers need to understand the effectiveness of these placements to justify investments into them. Three studies were conducted to study the effectiveness of product placements in movies. Essay one studied the economic worth of product placements on the long term profitability of the firm through an event study. Analysis of 467 placements of movies released during 1968-2007 shows that product placements generate a mean cumulative abnormal return of 0.21% during the (-1, +2) event window. Hierarchical linear modeling of the abnormal returns in cross-sectional analysis indicates that placement duration positively impacts the abnormal returns. Placement blatancy was found to negatively affect placements' worth. We did not find any support for the effect of critical reviews or presence of a star director on the worth of product placements. Crime and comedy genres were found to positively affect abnormal returns of placements. Additional MANCOVA analysis, using different event windows as the dependent variable, suggests that a period of two weeks might be required after a movie's release for the information about placement execution factors to be incorporated by the market in its evaluation of the firm. In essay two we study the effectiveness of product placement from a memory perspective by means of a longitudinal study, using a student subject panel. Subjects were exposed to a full- length movie and recognition was tracked at weekly intervals for a period of four weeks. Results of a dynamic panel analysis using generalized estimating equations indicate that audience recognition for a movie placement significantly diminishes one to two weeks after exposure to the movie. In addition, recognition of placements is enhanced by audiences' attitude toward product placements. Recognition is further affected by placement execution factors. Specifically, we found that audio placements and placements of longer duration positively affect placement recognition. Plot connectivity and character association did not significantly impact recognition over time. Essay three examines the impact of brand-character association on consumer attitude toward the placed brand. A 2x2 within subjects experiment, using a full-length movie as a stimulus, was conducted on a panel of student subjects to assess the interaction effect of character-brand valence on consumer attitude. Results support a significant interaction between character and brand valence. Analyses also indicate that congruency between character and brand valence enhances affective measures toward the placed brand, supporting the congruency theory and Meaning Transfer Model. Additionally, we found that brand familiarity fully mediates the character-valence interaction. Limitations and Implications of the studies were also discussed.

This paper explores the relationship between Chinese rare earth metals (REMs) and the industries in the U.S and Europe that heavily rely on them. The study uses the EGARCH(1,1)-ARMA(1,0) process for conditional volatility and incorporates it into VAR(8) framework for forecast error variance decomposition to evaluate the static and dynamic volatility spillovers using daily data from the 2nd of January 2018 to the 3rd of March 2023. The liaison of risk management is also consolidated through the incorporation of Value at Risk and Event Study. Our findings indicate that the volatility interconnectedness between the Chinese REMs market and computer and electronics, electric vehicle, and wind energy industries exhibits relatively low volatility spillover to and from each other. Value at Risk measures suggests complexity in assessing the potential short-term losses for REM equity, leading to difficulties in risk management. Establishing and utilizing a derivatives market could be beneficial for future notice. However, the study also highlights that severe geopolitical risk or conflict could enable extreme levels of financial risk due to the global supply dominance of the Chinese quasi-monopolistic construct and the elements' overall criticality in the sustainable energy transition. The study also highlights the infeasibility of Western nations decoupling themselves from the Chinese REM supply. Various factors such as the pace of advancement in sourcing alternatives, technological advancements, and recycling technology are the main drivers of ineligibility. The forecasted global demand for REMs is also expected to increase significantly, primarily driven by the renewable and sustainable energy transition worldwide, further straining the possibility of independence. Therefore, the pace of advancement of these factors must collectively supersede that of the forecasted demand to mitigate the risk. Keywords: Rare Earth Metals, Interconnectedness, Conditional Volatility, Risk Management, Value at Risk, Event Study.

The aim of this study is to examine how profit warnings affect company valuation on companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange and what factors contribute to the valuation effects. Using an event study approach, we compute the cumulative abnormal returns following profit warnings between 2016 and 2022. Our findings show that companies issuing profit warnings experience substantial abnormal returns at the time of the announcement but that there are no cumulative abnormal returns the days after the issuance of profit warnings. Company-specific characteristics and properties of profit warnings do not explain the abnormal returns. However, the state of the business cycle does. The study provides insight into what factors mediate the market participants’ reaction to profit warnings. Also, it considers how current market contingencies impact abnormal returns the days after profit warnings are released. A key limitation is that the study does not consider the financial information disclosed in the profit warnings in any quantitative detail. The results of the study are partly inconsistent with previous studies on profit warnings regarding the effects of company-specific characteristics, properties of profit warnings, and abnormal returns after the issuance of profit warnings.