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The Swedish population has the world’s largest percentage of shareholders either by direct or indirect owning. Due to the increasing interest of equity capital markets, private as well as institutional investors rely on forecasts from financial analysts. The reason for this is due to the lack of expertise among investors in this area. Due to the fact that analysts influence the Swedish stock market immensely, it’s of great interest to explore whether an analyst can be seen as a rational participant. At the same time, we would like to see what impact psychological factors have on the analysts in their work and which these psychological factors are. To battle these questions, we have chosen to take a qualitative approach in our research, basing it on interviews. In our opinion, interviewing a person gives a more balanced picture as the respondents have the possibility to have a dialog/discussion with the interviewer. The selection of interviewees was not random, instead we chose to interview nine different financial analysts working for big popular firms in Stockholm and Copenhagen. Our research presents the psychological factors which affect financial analysts. We are convinced to have found strong enough indications to draw general conclusions for financial analysts, active on the Nordic stock market. The study has shown a given relation between experience and psychological effects. The awareness of the psychological impact on the stock market exists among all financial analysts. But we have found that it’s more likely for an inexperienced financial analyst to be affected by these. The factors that have the largest effect on analysts are mostly trends, herding, overreaction and noise. Finally our research shows a psychological position of dependence for the companies the analyst value. These are the providers of information for analysts, in practice a sale recommendation can lead to less information being shared with him or her. Further on, it’s generally seen to be more commercial correct publishing a buy recommendation as these generate more incomes and business connection for the analyst’s employer. The conclusions points out that an analyst often adopts over-optimism when analysing companies.

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The purpose of this study is to provide the view on the online advertising’s characteristics during the present financial crisis in Sweden. To achieve the purpose, multiple case study of four main Swedish banks is used with the predominance of descriptive method. The main finding of this study is close interaction between the advertising character and market trends impact. This main observation has a great impact on the character of the analysis and affects almost every functional aspect of the advertising. Besides that, also five other main observations were made. Following them, it is especially worth to mention that advertising can be a source of competitiveness, a way of differentiation or a way of conditioning customer. From all the study findings, clear image of ads typical features, functions and roles in the banks’ prosperity arises.

The current financial crisis has spread around the world and no business sector has stayed untouched. While companies in some sectors have been forced to close down or lay off employees, companies in the food retail sector mainly have to adapt to their customers´ preferences, which according to Ang, Leong & Kotler (2000) change in times of financial crisis. The purpose of this dissertation was therefore to examine how Swedish food retailers adapt their marketing strategies to the changing consumer buying behavior during the financial crisis. A qualitative method with an abductive approach was chosen for this research, and the empirical data was gathered from three companies in the Swedish food retail sector; ICA, Coop and Axfood. Primary data was collected through phone interviews and was supported by annual information from their websites, annual reports and different articles. The findings show that all three companies have recognized a change in their consumers buying behavior and done several changes in their marketing strategies. This research can be useful for every company in the same or similar situation, in order to see how important it is to have a flexible marketing strategy and be able to adapt to the changing environment in order to either survive or improve their position on the market.

The purpose of this paper is to explore problems in current GAAP, including earnings management and illogical accounting practices. The paper then looks at proposed solutions to these problems, but shows how, from a creditor's perspective, these solutions fall short. My conclusion is that by creating two sets of GAAP, one for large publicly traded companies and one for smaller privately held companies, financial statements will be more representationally faithful for the creditors utilizing the financial statements.

Previous research on the coinsurance effect solely focuses on the coinsurance of corporate debt and ignores the possibility that a combined entity’s assets may coinsure other financial obligations with debt-like characteristics. The present study examines the breadth of the coinsurance effect by testing whether the theory extends to labor obligations. Using an event study methodology, I analyze merger events between the 2000-2012 period. I investigate how acquirer shareholders are affected by the coinsurance effect during this period by examining acquirer common stock returns at the announcement date of the merger event. My results do not produce significant evidence to suggest that the coinsurance effect can be extended to include labor obligations. Moreover, no significant evidence of the coinsurance effect is discovered in the analysis.

Using the U.S. Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Modernization Act ("GLBA") as a model, I argue that this act of financial reform, promulgated in November 1999, is a result of "Re-regulation", rather than "Deregulation" as suggested by most scholars. I emphasize the linear development of the GLBA, from 'regulation' to 'deregulation' and then further to 're-regulation'. This linear direction denotes sequential regulatory development that concerns the gradual relaxation of permissible banking activities, which is correspondingly marked by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, and the GLBA of 1999. The GLBA enabled the U.S. financial services industry to begin offering all round financial services under the single roof of the Financial Holding Company("FHC"). The GLBA's mandate is to provide the U.S. financial services industry with a level playing field and allow them to compete with their strongest rivals from th eEuropean Union. European Union banks already operate under a liberal regime, following the success of the Second Banking Directive of 1989 that embraces financial liberalization. Taiwan's Financial Holding Company Act ("FHCA"), promulgated in July 2001,owes much of its content to its U.S. counterpart, the GLBA. Taiwan's FHCA is basically modeled after the U.S. GLBA but selectively adopts parts of the E.U. model. The U.S. model is represented by the GLBA while the E.U. model is represented by the Second Banking Directive. Through cross-selling and cross-marketing, financial holding companies in the U.S. model and universal banks in the E.U. model, both can achieve economies of scale and scope. This dissertation is otherwise devoted to providing a comparative analysis on certain key elements of the U.S. GLBA and Taiwan's FHCA, although I sometimes refer to the E.U.'s Second Banking Directive. I conclude that while Taiwan's FHCs lack the economic scale of U.S. FHCs, the adoption of the U.S. model in the FHCA offers Taiwan's FHCs better fire wall protection than the E.U. model would. More generally speaking, there are pros and cons to Taiwan's adoption of the GLBA. The GLBA and by extension the FHCA require its domestically established FHCs be pure holding companies, as opposed to the E. U. model which requires the parent companies (universal banks) to also be operating holding companies.

Using detailed data of individual investors, this dissertation investigates whether and how individuals use financial disclosure and analysts’ signals. Chapter 1 shows that, on average, individuals invest more in firms with readable, concise, and transparent financial disclosures. The results indicate that these relations are less pronounced for overconfident investors, and that individual investors appear to place a greater weighting on such financial disclosure attributes relative to institutional investors. In supplementary analyses, I further examine cross-sectional variations among individuals in their use of disclosure, and find two main subgroups that do not display a preference for accessible and transparent disclosures. The first subgroup is speculative investors, whose investment strategies rely on conjecture rather than knowledge, and the second subgroup is financially literate investors, those with lower information processing costs. These findings support the notion that more accessible and transparent disclosures are used by those individuals who need them the most: i.e., the average American. Lastly, I examine whether individuals’ investment performance varies with financial disclosure attributes and show that individuals’ returns are, on average, increasing in firms with more accessible and transparent disclosures. Chapter 2 examines how individuals react to revisions in analysts’ recommendations and earnings forecasts. First, the analyses show that individuals’ abnormal trading activity increases by 30 percent in response to analysts’ recommendation revisions and by 15 percent in response to analysts’ earnings forecast revisions. Second, the analyses indicate that 47 percent of individuals trade consistently with analyst guidance and 53 percent trade contrarian to analysts’ guidance, which opposes the belief that individuals are a homogenous group of investors. The contrarian behavior is most common in response to analyst downgrades (i.e., purchasing after downgrades) and is most evident among individuals with better prior performance, individuals who trade infrequently, men, and older individuals. Lastly, the study provides evidence suggesting that trading contrarian to analysts is in general hazardous to individuals’ financial health. Taken together, the results indicate that individuals respond to analyst guidance and that individuals’ use of analyst guidance varies significantly with respect to their personal attributes.

The main objective of this thesis is to implement stochastic correlation into the existing structural credit risk models. There are two stochastic models suggested for the covariance matrix of the assets' prices. In our first model, to induce the stochasticity into the structure of the correlation, we assume that the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix are constant but the eigenvalues are driven by independent Cox-Ingersoll-Ross processes. To price equity options on this framework we first transform the calculations from the pricing domain to the frequency domain. Then we derive a closed formula for the Fourier transform of the Green's function of the pricing PDE. Finally we use the method of images to find the price of the equity options. The same method is used to find closed formulas for marginal probabilities of defaults and CDS prices. In our second model, the covariance of the assets follows a Wishart process, which is an extension of the CIR model to dimensions greater than one. The popularity of the Heston model, which uses the CIR process to model the stochastic volatility, could be a promising point for using Wishart process to model stochastic correlation. We give closed form solutions for equity options, marginal probabilities of defaults, and some other major financial derivatives. For the calculation of our pricing formulas we make a bridge between two recent trends in pricing theory; from one side, pricing of barrier options by Lipton (2001) and Sepp (2006) and from other side the development of Wishart processes by Bru (1991), Gourieroux (2005) and Fonseca et al. (2006, 2007a, 2007b). After obtaining the mathematical results above, we then estimate the parameters of the two models we have developed by an evolutionary algorithm. We prove a theorem which guarantees the convergence of the evolutionary algorithm to the set of optimizing parameters. After estimating the parameters of the two stochastic correlation models, we conduct a comparative analysis of our stochastic correlation models. We give an approximation formula for the joint and marginal probabilities of default for General Motors and Ford. For the marginal probabilities of default, a closed formula is given and for the joint probabilities of default an approximation formula is suggested. To show the convergence properties of this approximation method, we perform the Monte Carlo simulation in two forms: a full and a partial Monte Carlo simulation. At the end, we compare the marginal and joint probabilities with full and partial Monte Carlo simulations.