This thesis aims to take part of and contribute to the continuously ongoing debate ongender diversity, more specific about gender diversity in the operational level includingthe gender of CEO in Swedish firms across the Large cap, Mid Cap and Small Cap lists.The purpose is to analyze whether there is a statistical significance between operationalgender diversity and financial performance as well as firm volatility. The thesis uses aquantitative method with an OLS multiple regression analysis on a total of 448 Swedishlisted firms. The measures used for performance are return on assets (ROA) and return onequity (ROE), as well as volatility as a risk measure. The test variables used are femaleCEO and female executives, against the control variables females in the board, sector,market capitalization and full-time employees. The results of the thesis suggest that thereis not any significant correlation between the gender of the CEO and firm performance aswell as volatility, and there is neither any significant correlation between the genderdiversity amongst the executives and the firm performance or stock volatility.

This paper describes and develops a trade off model of optimal capital structure by Bradley et al. (1984). The model is then tested to examine how changes in corporate tax rates affect the optimal capital structure of firms. Based on theoretical implications of the model, four hypotheses are derived stating that firms’ optimal debt-to-value ratio is (1) negatively related to financial distress costs, (2) negatively related to non-debt tax shields, (3) negatively related to firm volatility and (4) positively related to the corporate tax rate. Based on the results of two regression models applied on 753 Scandinavian and German firms, we find empirical support for hypothesis 1 and 3 while we find no empirical support for hypothesis 2 and 4. These results can be explained by problematic empirical proxies and in the light of the pecking-order theory.