This study investigates the relationship between firm performance and institutionalownership in Sweden. This study contributes to the ongoing debate between researchersregarding the potential benefit of institutional owners through increased monitoringcapabilities. A panel data analysis and a fixed effects model estimated with generalized leastsquares is utilized to investigate the relationship between performance and ownership structure,controlling for firm size, foreign ownership, leverage and return on equity. While having astrong theoretical foundation no correlation is found between institutional ownership and firmperformance. This is true even when institutional owners are further divided into pressureresistantand pressure-sensitive owners. This study indicates that institutional ownership has noimpact on firm performance. These findings are consistent with similar studies performed inother Nordic countries. / Master thesis

<p>The purpose of this thesis is to examine whether institutional ownership has an influence on CEO compensation in companies where the institutions have invested. In order to fulfil the purpose of the thesis a quantitative study was carried out within the Swedish corporate context where we have studied Swedish institutional investors and companies quoted on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Our period of study was the financial year of 2007.</p><p>The empirical questions at issue is; Was there a connection between Swedish institutional ownership and the size of the CEO compensation, and, does Swedish institutional ownership lead to a certain type of CEO compensation in terms of structure?</p><p>Our results did not suggest that an increased institutional ownership neither leads to a certain type of salary level nor a certain kind of salary structure. These results contradict earlier American research, which has been done within this area and has previously shown a secured connection.</p><p>The reasons for our results may be many and it is difficult to state any concrete conclusions to why we received differing results. Based on our results we can only state that institutional ownership is not decisive for the formation of CEO compensation. It remains for future research to disprove the results of this study.</p> / <p>Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka hur institutionellt ägande påverkar VD-lönerna i de företag i vilka de har investerat. För att uppfylla vårt syfte har vi genomfört en kvantitativ studie inom den svenska företagskontexten där vi studerat bolag som var noterade på Stockholmsbörsens Large Cap-lista samt svenska institutionella investerare. Den tidsperiod som studerades var räkenskapsåret 2007.</p><p>De frågeställningar som vi ämnar besvara är dels om det finns ett samband mellan svenskt institutionellt ägande och storlek på VD-lön i svenska börsbolag, dels om svenskt institutionellt ägande leder till en viss typ av VD-lönestruktur i svenska börsbolag.</p><p>Våra resultat visar på intet sätt att ökade ägarandelar för institutioner leder till vare sig en viss typ av lönenivå eller en viss typ av lönestruktur. Detta går emot tidigare amerikansk forskning på området som har funnit just dessa samband.</p><p>Förklaringarna till våra resultat kan vara flera och det är svårt att lägga fram några konkreta slutsatser om vad våra resultat beror på. Utifrån våra resultat så kan vi endast konstatera att institutionellt ägande inte är avgörande för VD-löner utformning. Det återstår för vidare forskning att motbevisa det vi kommit fram till.<em></em></p>

The purpose of this thesis is to examine whether institutional ownership has an influence on CEO compensation in companies where the institutions have invested. In order to fulfil the purpose of the thesis a quantitative study was carried out within the Swedish corporate context where we have studied Swedish institutional investors and companies quoted on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Our period of study was the financial year of 2007. The empirical questions at issue is; Was there a connection between Swedish institutional ownership and the size of the CEO compensation, and, does Swedish institutional ownership lead to a certain type of CEO compensation in terms of structure? Our results did not suggest that an increased institutional ownership neither leads to a certain type of salary level nor a certain kind of salary structure. These results contradict earlier American research, which has been done within this area and has previously shown a secured connection. The reasons for our results may be many and it is difficult to state any concrete conclusions to why we received differing results. Based on our results we can only state that institutional ownership is not decisive for the formation of CEO compensation. It remains for future research to disprove the results of this study. / Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka hur institutionellt ägande påverkar VD-lönerna i de företag i vilka de har investerat. För att uppfylla vårt syfte har vi genomfört en kvantitativ studie inom den svenska företagskontexten där vi studerat bolag som var noterade på Stockholmsbörsens Large Cap-lista samt svenska institutionella investerare. Den tidsperiod som studerades var räkenskapsåret 2007. De frågeställningar som vi ämnar besvara är dels om det finns ett samband mellan svenskt institutionellt ägande och storlek på VD-lön i svenska börsbolag, dels om svenskt institutionellt ägande leder till en viss typ av VD-lönestruktur i svenska börsbolag. Våra resultat visar på intet sätt att ökade ägarandelar för institutioner leder till vare sig en viss typ av lönenivå eller en viss typ av lönestruktur. Detta går emot tidigare amerikansk forskning på området som har funnit just dessa samband. Förklaringarna till våra resultat kan vara flera och det är svårt att lägga fram några konkreta slutsatser om vad våra resultat beror på. Utifrån våra resultat så kan vi endast konstatera att institutionellt ägande inte är avgörande för VD-löner utformning. Det återstår för vidare forskning att motbevisa det vi kommit fram till.

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This thesis aims to examine whether it is possible to forecast which firmswill be shorted. To do this a regression was constructed using a sample of thecompanies currently included in S&amp;P 500. Short interest as percentage offloat was set as the dependent variable with volatility, institutionalownership, past stock returns, growth in net sales and price-to-earnings ratio(P/E) as the independent variables. Our results concluded that all variablesexcept institutional ownership were statistically significant at a 5% level withthree of these being significant even at a 1% level. Based on these results, webelieve that it to a certain degree is possible to forecast which firms will beshorted.

This paper examines the relative price spreads between dual-class shares issued by the same firm on the Swedish market in order to investigate if a voting premium exists and what factors contribute to it. Previous research has found diverging explanations for the variation in price spreads between dual-class shares. Some find explanatory power in the concentration of ownership whilst others find trading costs and liquidity to determine the size and direction of the voting premium. This study tests factors of control and liquidity against the relative price spread in the Swedish market and in accordance with earlier research, the results indicate that a statistically significant voting premium exists in Sweden, although it is relatively small in comparison to many other markets. The paper contributes to the current pool of research by the choice of market, and by adding up-to-date information regarding the voting premium as well as evidence that increased domestic institutional ownership affects the voting premium negatively. At the same time, foreign institutional ownership has an opposite effect and leads to increased price differences between share classes. The general conclusion of this paper is that while some factors related to control and ownership concentration show significance long-term, other unobserved aspects could provide greater explanatory power of the voting premium in the short term.

Bakgrund: Den globala uppvärmningen är en av vår tids stora utmaningar. Företagen står för en stor del av utsläppen och därav är det av vikt hur företagen styrs framåt, då styrningen påverkar företagens miljöarbete. Olika mekanismer av bolagsstyrning kan påverka företagens miljöarbete och dessa mekanismer kan även tänkas variera i påverkan mellan olika institutionella kontexter. Syfte: Syftet med studien är att göra en jämförande studie mellan Sverige, Tyskland och Frankrike angående om bolagsstyrningsmekanismer har en påverkan på finansiella och miljömässiga prestationer samt om miljömässiga prestationer har en påverkan på finansiella prestationer. Metod: Metoden som använts är longitudinell och komparativ med en deduktiv ansats. Agentteorin, aktieägarperspektivet, intressentteorin, legitimitetsteorin, CSR som praktisk tillämpning samt tidigare forskning har legat till grund för studiens hypoteser. Slutsatser: Resultaten ger indikationer på att det finns både likheter och skillnader i vilken relation bolagsstyrningsmekanismerna har med miljömässiga och finansiella prestationer mellan länderna. Relationer mellan miljömässiga och finansiellaprestationer finns endast i Tyskland och Frankrike, vilket tyder på att det finns skillnader mellan länderna i vilken påverkan miljöarbetet i ett företag kan ha på lönsamheten. / Background: Global warming is one of the greatest challenges of our time. Companies is responsible for a large part of the emissions and how companies are governed moving forward is of importance since governance impacts companies’ environmental work. Different mechanisms in corporate governance may impact their environmental work and the mechanisms may vary in impact between different institutional contexts. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to do a comparative study between Sweden, Germany, and France regarding whether certain mechanisms in corporate governance may have an impact on financial and environmental performance and also if environmental performance has an impact on financial performance. Method: The method used is a combination of longitudinal and comparative method with a deductive approach. Agency theory, shareholder perspective, stakeholder theory, legitimacy theory, CSR as a practical application as well as former research is used to formulate the hypotheses of the study. Conclusion: The results of the study indicate that both similarities and differences in the relationship between corporate governance and financial and environmental performance exists between the countries. Relationships between environmental and financial performance is only existing in Germany and France, which indicates that there are differences between the countries regarding the impact environmental work in a company may have on profitability.

This dissertation collects four essays on banks, firms and real effects of bank lending. Owing to the appliance of different econometric methods on several datasets, insights in the behav-ior of and the impacts from financial markets and market participants are generated. In the first chapter, our results uncover a so far undocumented ability of the interbank market to distinguish between banks of different quality in times of aggregate distress. We show empirical evidence that during the 2007 financial crisis the inability of some banks to roll over their interbank debt was not due to a failure of the interbank market per se but rather to bank-specific shocks affecting banks’ capital, liquidity and credit quality as well as revised bank-level risk perceptions. Relationship banking is not capable of containing these frictions, as hard information seems to dominate soft information. In detail, we explore determinants of the formation and resilience of interbank lending relationships by analyzing an extensive da-taset comprising over 1.9 million interbank relationships of more than 3,500 German banks between 2000 and 2012. The second chapter examines the relationship between central bank funding and credit risk-taking. Employing bank-firm-level data from the German credit registry during 2009:Q1-2014:Q4, we find that banks borrowing from the central bank rebalance their portfolios to-wards ex-ante riskier firms. We further establish that this effect is driven by the ECB’s maturi-ty extensions and that the risk-taking sensitivity of banks borrowing from the ECB is inde-pendent of idiosyncratic bank characteristics. Finally, we show that these shifts in bank lend-ing are associated with an increase in firm-level investment and employment, but also with a deterioration of bank balance sheet quality in the following year. Once we analyze the relationship of banks as lenders vis-à-vis banks as borrowers and banks as lenders vis-à-vis non-financial companies as borrowers, we enlarge the understand-ing of non-financial companies not only in terms of being simply borrowers, respectively sub-jects exhibiting of credit risks. Instead, we try to understand the inner working of those com-panies more generally and analyze their quality not only in terms of a bank’s risk assessment but also in terms of the overall market assessment. However, this in turn can generate infor-mation useable to assess the quality of a bank’s credit portfolio in dimensions that so far are not taken into account by the current regulatory framework. Moreover, a better understanding of banks and non-banks beyond the standard lens of the banking and corporate finance litera-ture might promote new scopes for future research connecting those discrete subjects. In this regard, the third chapter analyzes the dependence of price reactions to corporate insider trad-ing on several measures of corporate governance quality. Our results strongly support the view that first, higher corporate governance levels seem to prevent or discourage insiders from engaging in insider trading as means of opportunistic rent extraction. Second, results confirm the notion of buy and sell trades not being just two sides of the same coin. That is, a higher level of corporate governance leads to a better pre-event information environment which results in less positive abnormal returns after insider buy trades as the incremental posi-tive information revealed by the trade is smaller. In contrast, sell trades in firms with better corporate governance are perceived to convey more valuable and most importantly negative information to the capital market so that prices adjust more for companies with better govern-ance schemes. Third, we show that institutional ownership even on an aggregate level is a sufficient measure to proxy a company’s corporate governance level. Hence, as information on companies’ bylaws and on investors’ investment dedication and type for example are scarce, respectively associated with higher costs because one has to gather that information one can refrain from that and instead proxy the governance level with the aggregate measure of institutional ownership. The latter result is important for carrying out future analyses merg-ing and extending the findings of the first two chapters. Last, the fourth chapter abstracts from borrowers as subjects of credit risk, as well, and most importantly extends the analysis of banks, firms and their interactions effecting each other by a macroeconomic perspective of the real effects of bank lending. That is, as capital flows and real estate are pro-cyclical, and real estate has a substantial weight in economies’ income and wealth Chapter 4 studies the role of real estate markets in the transmission of bank flow shocks to output growth across German cities. In this regard, real sector firms play a central role in the transmission mechanism we uncover. More specifically, the empirical analysis relies on a new and unique matched data set at the city level and the bank-firm level. To measure bank flow shocks, we show that changes in sovereign spreads of Southern Eu-ropean countries (the so-called PIGS spread) can predict German cross-border bank flows. To achieve identification by geographic variation, in addition to a traditional supply-side varia-ble, we use a novel instrument that exploits a policy assigning refugee immigrants to munici-palities on an exogenous basis. We find that output growth responds more to bank flow shocks in cities that are more exposed to tightness in local real estate markets. We estimate that, during the 2009-2014 period, for every 100-basis point increase in the PIGS spread, the most exposed cities grow 15-2 basis points more than the least exposed ones. Moreover, the differential response of commercial property prices can explain most of this growth differen-tial. When we unpack the transmission mechanism by using matched bank-firm-level data on credit, employment, capital expenditure and TFP, we find that firm real estate collateral as measured by tangible fixed assets plays a critical role. In particular, bank flow shocks in-crease the credit supply to firms and sectors with more real estate collateral. Higher credit supply then leads firms to hire and invest more, without evidence of capital misallocation.