<p>Syfte: Att bolag inte alltid styrs av sina ägare har varit betydande för marknadsekonomins utveckling. Införandet av aktiebolag sänkte riskerna samtidigt som möjligheterna ökade. I börsnoterade bolag finns ofta ett brett ägande vilket innebär risker vid tillvaratagandet av intressen. Ägare och ledning är sällan den samma och deras intressen skiljer sig ofta åt. För att minska riskerna har många länder infört olika bolagsstyrningskoder. Bolagsstyrning handlar om hur bolag ska drivas utifrån ägarnas intressen. År 2004 fick Sverige sin egen kod för bolagsstyrning kallad Svensk kod för bolagsstyrning. Kodens syfte var att förbättra styrningen av svenska bolag och är en självreglering inom näringslivet. Koden bygger på principen ”följ eller förklara” som innebär att ett bolag kan avvika från koden så länge de förklarar varför. Syftet med min uppsats är besvara frågeställningarna:</p><p>• Hur säger bolagen att de avviker från Svensk kod för bolagsstyrning?</p><p>• Av vilken anledning säger bolagen att de valt att avvika?</p><p>Metod: Undersökningen är kvantitativ och bygger uteslutande på sekundärkällor i form av bolagsstyrningsrapporter från 133 bolag listade på Nordiska listan. Jag har checkat av hur många bolag som avviker från respektive punkt i koden. I min undersökning har jag helt utgått från vad bolagen själva säger att de avviker från. Efter detta har jag tittat på hur dessa avvikelser påverkar ägarna.</p><p>Resultat & slutsats: Min undersökning visar på att endast 9% av de listade bolagen har fler än tre avvikelser från koden. Undersökningen visar även att det endast från 7% av kodens 71 punkter avveks fler än 9 gånger. Detta tyder på att bolagen valt att anpassa sig till koden om de inte redan innan hade en organisation som följde kraven. I de flesta fall hade bolagens förklaringar till avvikelse från kodens olika punkter liknande förklaringar. Enligt min mening har avvikelserna störst effekt på mindre aktieägare då de inte har lika stort inflytande när det gäller att ändra bolagets organisation.</p><p>Förslag till fortsatt forskning:</p><p>• Vad ser bolagen för fördelar respektive nackdelar med koden?</p><p>• Hur kan koden utvecklas för att skydda minoritetsägare?</p><p>• Bör det finnas krav på hur bolagens förklaringar ska se ut?</p><p>• Bör det finnas en myndighet som kontrollerar att förklaringarna är tillräckligt tydliga?</p><p>Uppsatsens bidrag: En sammanställning som denna kan användas till att utvärdera koden för att se vilka anpassningar som kan vara nödvändiga.</p> / <p>Aim: The fact that corporations haven’t always been run by its owners has had a great impact to the development of market economy. Corporations lowered the risks at the same time as possibilities increased. Stock-market corporations often mean a wide ownership including a lot of risks in taking care of everybody’s interests. To reduce these risks many countries have implied corporate governance codes. Corporate governance is about the fact that corporations shall be run according to the owner’s interests. Year 2004 Sweden got its own corporate governance code by the name Swedish corporate governance code. The purpose was to improve Swedish corporate governances and the code is a self-regulation. The code is based on the principle “apply or explain” meaning that a corporation can diverge the code as long as they explain why. The purpose of my investigation is to try to answer the following questions:</p><p>• How do the corporations say they diverge from Swedish corporate governance code?</p><p>• What explanations do they give to the diverges?</p><p>Method: This investigation is quantitative and based exclusively on secondary sources like corporate governance reports from the 113 corporations listed at the Nordic list. I have checked how many corporations have diverged from each part of the code. My investigation is entirely based on what the corporations say they diverge from. I have also investigated how these diversions affect the stock-holders.</p><p>Result & Conclusions: My investigation shows that only 9% of the corporations have more then three diversions from the code. It also shows that only 7% of the codes 71 parts were diverged from more then 9 times. This indicates that the corporations have applied the code. In most cases the corporation’s explanations to the diversions were the same. In my opinion the diversions have the most effect on the smallest owners. This since they do not have the same power to change the organization of the corporation.</p><p>Suggestions for future research:</p><p>• What benefits and disadvantages do the corporations see in the code?</p><p>• How can the code be developed to protect minority owners?</p><p>• Should there be demands on how the explanations should be?</p><p>• Should there be an authority that controls the substance of the explanations?</p><p>Contribution of the thesis: A compile like this could be used to evaluate the code and see which adaptation is necessary.</p>

Syfte: Att bolag inte alltid styrs av sina ägare har varit betydande för marknadsekonomins utveckling. Införandet av aktiebolag sänkte riskerna samtidigt som möjligheterna ökade. I börsnoterade bolag finns ofta ett brett ägande vilket innebär risker vid tillvaratagandet av intressen. Ägare och ledning är sällan den samma och deras intressen skiljer sig ofta åt. För att minska riskerna har många länder infört olika bolagsstyrningskoder. Bolagsstyrning handlar om hur bolag ska drivas utifrån ägarnas intressen. År 2004 fick Sverige sin egen kod för bolagsstyrning kallad Svensk kod för bolagsstyrning. Kodens syfte var att förbättra styrningen av svenska bolag och är en självreglering inom näringslivet. Koden bygger på principen ”följ eller förklara” som innebär att ett bolag kan avvika från koden så länge de förklarar varför. Syftet med min uppsats är besvara frågeställningarna: • Hur säger bolagen att de avviker från Svensk kod för bolagsstyrning? • Av vilken anledning säger bolagen att de valt att avvika? Metod: Undersökningen är kvantitativ och bygger uteslutande på sekundärkällor i form av bolagsstyrningsrapporter från 133 bolag listade på Nordiska listan. Jag har checkat av hur många bolag som avviker från respektive punkt i koden. I min undersökning har jag helt utgått från vad bolagen själva säger att de avviker från. Efter detta har jag tittat på hur dessa avvikelser påverkar ägarna. Resultat &amp; slutsats: Min undersökning visar på att endast 9% av de listade bolagen har fler än tre avvikelser från koden. Undersökningen visar även att det endast från 7% av kodens 71 punkter avveks fler än 9 gånger. Detta tyder på att bolagen valt att anpassa sig till koden om de inte redan innan hade en organisation som följde kraven. I de flesta fall hade bolagens förklaringar till avvikelse från kodens olika punkter liknande förklaringar. Enligt min mening har avvikelserna störst effekt på mindre aktieägare då de inte har lika stort inflytande när det gäller att ändra bolagets organisation. Förslag till fortsatt forskning: • Vad ser bolagen för fördelar respektive nackdelar med koden? • Hur kan koden utvecklas för att skydda minoritetsägare? • Bör det finnas krav på hur bolagens förklaringar ska se ut? • Bör det finnas en myndighet som kontrollerar att förklaringarna är tillräckligt tydliga? Uppsatsens bidrag: En sammanställning som denna kan användas till att utvärdera koden för att se vilka anpassningar som kan vara nödvändiga. / Aim: The fact that corporations haven’t always been run by its owners has had a great impact to the development of market economy. Corporations lowered the risks at the same time as possibilities increased. Stock-market corporations often mean a wide ownership including a lot of risks in taking care of everybody’s interests. To reduce these risks many countries have implied corporate governance codes. Corporate governance is about the fact that corporations shall be run according to the owner’s interests. Year 2004 Sweden got its own corporate governance code by the name Swedish corporate governance code. The purpose was to improve Swedish corporate governances and the code is a self-regulation. The code is based on the principle “apply or explain” meaning that a corporation can diverge the code as long as they explain why. The purpose of my investigation is to try to answer the following questions: • How do the corporations say they diverge from Swedish corporate governance code? • What explanations do they give to the diverges? Method: This investigation is quantitative and based exclusively on secondary sources like corporate governance reports from the 113 corporations listed at the Nordic list. I have checked how many corporations have diverged from each part of the code. My investigation is entirely based on what the corporations say they diverge from. I have also investigated how these diversions affect the stock-holders. Result &amp; Conclusions: My investigation shows that only 9% of the corporations have more then three diversions from the code. It also shows that only 7% of the codes 71 parts were diverged from more then 9 times. This indicates that the corporations have applied the code. In most cases the corporation’s explanations to the diversions were the same. In my opinion the diversions have the most effect on the smallest owners. This since they do not have the same power to change the organization of the corporation. Suggestions for future research: • What benefits and disadvantages do the corporations see in the code? • How can the code be developed to protect minority owners? • Should there be demands on how the explanations should be? • Should there be an authority that controls the substance of the explanations? Contribution of the thesis: A compile like this could be used to evaluate the code and see which adaptation is necessary.

Ett undantag från revisionsplikten infördes för mindre aktiebolag den 1 november 2010, som berör ungefär 70 % av de svenska aktiebolagen eller 250 000 bolag. Vid kreditgivningen behöver bankerna information för att minska risken och vikten vid att informationen stämmer är stor. Revisorn är ett sätt för att bekräfta informationen och öka trovärdigheten för räkenskaperna. Detta ledde till vår problemformulering: Förändras trovärdigheten i ett bolags finansiella rapporter om aktiebolaget väljer bort revisionen? Vilka konsekvenser får det för bolagen i relation till bankerna? Syftet är att få en bild av om trovärdigheten hos ett bolag förändras då de väljer bort revisionen och vilka konsekvenser det kan få. Studien har en deduktiv ansats, vilket innebär att vi började med datainsamling och teorier. Sedan har fyra intervjuer genomförts med banker i Örebro stad som sedan har analyserats med hjälp av teorier om revision, intressentmodellen och principal-agentteorin. En majoritet av bankerna säger att trovärdigheten till de finansiella rapporterna påverkas om bolaget avstår från revision. Dock har de inte vidtagit åtgärder på grund av detta och har därför inte fått några konsekvenser för de bolag som inte har revision. / An exemption from the audit requirement was introduced for smaller companies affecting about 70 %, or 250,000, of the Swedish limited companies. When lending, banks need information to reduce the risk. The auditor is a way to confirm the information and increase the credibility of the accounts. This led to our problem: Is the credibility of a company's financial statements changing for the limited companies that choose not to have an auditor? What are the consequences for the companies in relation to the banks? The purpose is to get a view if the credibility of a company changes when they opt out of the audit and the consequences it may have. The study has a deductive approach, which means that we started collecting data and theories. Then, four interviews were conducted with banks in the city of Örebro, which were analyzed using the theories of audit, stakeholder theory and principal-agent theory. A majority of the banks says that the credibility of the financial statements is affected if the company refrains from audit. However, they have not taken action because of this, and it have not had any impact on the companies that do not have audit.

In the last decade measuring a company´s performance exclusively financially has been heavily criticised. Consequently, different performance measurement systems including the Balanced Scorecard, the Performance Pyramid, and the Quantum Performance were developed, discussed and implemented in industry. Besides the financial perspective, additional perspectives (e.g. customers, processes, employess, etc) have been considered. Organisational performance is assumed to be a multidimensional phenomenon today. Hence one important aspect of the discussion of several concepts of performance measurement has been the selection of the right measures. This paper focused the problemof measuring multidimensional organisational performance. Based on the multitask agency theory we enhanced the approaches of Holmstrom/milgrom and Austin by introducing extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, cost of measurement and uncertainty of measurement into the model.

The construction contract is a document which governs the business relationship of Contractor and Employer for the duration of a construction project. However, the selection of the contract type for the project tends to be performed too shallowly. The present thesis aims to analyse how the contract type is chosen among the three paradigmatic contracts considered here: lump-sum contracts, target-cost contracts and cost-plus contracts. The basis of the study is a case study performed on Project X, a large mine construction project in Western Europe. The relevant literature to the subject was reviewed, mainly the principal-agent theory, literature on risk allocation and on contract selection. After identifying several factors which may influence the contract selection in the literature and in a preliminary interview, a survey was conducted to assess their relative influence in general and in particular for the Project X. The survey was responded by a small sample of highly qualified and experienced managers. and was complemented with in-depth interviews with the majority of them. Some research on the project and on contract documents of the NEC standard contract was also performed in order to provide a context of the characteristics of Project X. The findings of the three sources made it possible to confirm the influence on the selection of the contract type of many of the factors proposed. It was possible to shortlist a small number of factors which influenced the most the selection of the contract type for Project X. These were the preferred risk allocation by the parties, the ability to adapt the contract to scope changes, the knowledge of each contract type by the contracting parties, the improvement of the project delivery by the contract type and the aim to enhance cooperation between the parties. Factors not present in previous research were also discovered, such as the different financial costs of the contract types and the requirement of financial information by the funders of the parties. The very different opinions of the respondents to the survey and interviews regarding the selection of the contract type confirm that the parties should consider in more detail that complex process, because by now the parties are not really sure why they are choosing a certain contract type. Further research should be performed in the future to analyse the factors which influenced the contract type selection in other projects. The projects could also be analysed during their whole duration. Other contract types or variants of the three contract types studied in this thesis could also be added to the analysis.

(angl.) The diploma thesis covers placing public orders, which represent a large amount of expenses of the public sector - approximately 14% GDP in the Czech Republic. In detail, it focuses on the area of ICT, which is often mentioned in context with overpriced orders. The goal of the thesis is to analyze processes of placing orders in public sector via comparison and qualitative interviews with adequate respondents. Based on the outcomes of the analysis, there are proposed possible new system solutions. The work also deals with applicability of the Agency theory in this particular area.

In this paper, we explore drivers and mitigators of agency conflicts inherent in the fund manager-fund investor relationship through the lens of the principal-agent model. By engaging in abductive qualitative research, we apply both deductive and inductive inquiry to complement and extend previous literature with insights from parties directly involved in the Swedish mutual fund market. Hence, data is collected from eight semi-structured interviews with four senior fund managers, three institutional investors and one fund investment association, all operating in Sweden. The results of the study show that agency conflicts and mitigators found in previous studied principal-agent settings are also in large part found in the fund manager-fund investor setting in Sweden. However, this study has extended previous research by generating knowledge about drivers and mitigators of agency conflict found in the real world, which have been left unexplored in previous studies.

Share-based incentive programs have become increasingly common in Sweden. At the same time, there is criticism of whether these have a positive effect on companies or not. The programs are intended to solve the so-called principal-agent problem, which arises when the ownership and control in a company are separated. Share-based incentive programs are intended to solve this dilemma by making the employees who participate in the program’s shareholders of the company. This study has examined whether share-based incentive programs benefit the companies’ shareholders. The study investigates this by using a first-difference method, based on the publicly traded companies at Nasdaq Stockholm. The study takes support from the principal-agent theory, the managerial power theory, and other studies within the field. The result from the study shows that there is no significant difference between the companies that use the share-based incentive programs and the companies that do not. Based on this result, it is concluded that share-related incentive programs do not benefit shareholders. / Aktierelaterade incitamentsprogram blir allt vanligare i Sverige. Samtidigt finns det kritik mot huruvida dessa har en positiv effekt för företag eller inte. Programmen är tänkta att lösa det så kallad agentproblemet, som uppstår när ägandet och kontrollen i företag är separerade. Aktierelaterade incitamentsprogram är tänkta att lösa detta dilemma genom att göra de anställda som deltar i programmen till aktieägare i företaget. Denna studie har därför valt att undersöka huruvida aktierelaterade incitamentsprogram gynnar bolagets aktieägare. Studien undersöker detta genom att använda sig av en first-difference metod som baseras på bolagen på Stockholmsbörsen. Studien tar stöd från agentteorin, managerial power teorin samt tidigare forskning inom området. Resultatet från studien visar att det inte finns någon signifikant skillnad mellan bolagen som använder sig av de aktierelaterade incitamentsprogrammen och bolagen som inte använder sig av programmen. Utifrån detta resultat dras slutsatsen att aktierelaterade incitamentsprogram inte gynnar aktieägare.

This study explores the impact of ESG Scores on firm performance and seeks to establish whether the impact increased since the 2008 financial crisis. This is done by performing regressions on ESG Scores, and the respective pillars of Environmental, Social, and Governance, and firm performance, measured as both accounting-based performance, using ROA, and market-based performance, using Tobin’s Q. The study adopts a quantitative approach, utilising a random-effects model to analyse panel data across two sample periods - a pre-crisis period, from 2003-2006, and a post-crisis period, from 2010-2019. In addition, t-tests were performed to see if the impact changed significantly from the pre-crisis to post-crisis period. The study analyses data from 218 firms from the STOXX Europe 600 index, with four smaller sub-samples. The results indicate that ESG Scores have a positive impact on firm performance, with market-based firm performance being significantly correlated both before and after the crisis. Accounting-based performance, however, was only significantly correlated with ESG Scores before the crisis. In addition, the Environmental pillar was positively correlated with both measures of performance before and after the crisis, and the same was true for the Social pillar, except for with post-crisis accounting-based performance. Interestingly, the Governance pillar was not significantly correlated with performance in any of the regressions. Finally, while the average ESG Score among the observed companies increased in the post-crisis period, the impact of ESG performance on firm performance did not change significantly. The results of this study are supportive of the stakeholder theory perspective over the principal-agent theory, and show that ESG performance does indeed positively impact firm performance. Future research could explore whether other events have played a significant role in the rising importance of ESG, or if the results of the present study can be replicated across different time periods and geographical regions.

In the last decade measuring a company´s performance exclusively financially has been heavily criticised. Consequently, different performance measurement systems including the Balanced Scorecard, the Performance Pyramid, and the Quantum Performance were developed, discussed and implemented in industry. Besides the financial perspective, additional perspectives (e.g. customers, processes, employess, etc) have been considered. Organisational performance is assumed to be a multidimensional phenomenon today. Hence one important aspect of the discussion of several concepts of performance measurement has been the selection of the right measures. This paper focused the problemof measuring multidimensional organisational performance. Based on the multitask agency theory we enhanced the approaches of Holmstrom/milgrom and Austin by introducing extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, cost of measurement and uncertainty of measurement into the model.