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Despite stable growth in the national population, many rural municipalities in Sweden are suffering from persistent population decline. Because of the severe consequences this has for their economy and capacity to deliver welfare, many are anxious to find strategies to deal with the situation. This essay examines the local perspective on rural shrinkage by attempting to answer the question: How ca
The number of cross-border Mergers and Acquisitions involving an emerging economy as either acquirer or target is steadily increasing. Cultural and institutional distance thereby are important issues for cross-border M&A value creation, since countries involved in the deal can be very different in terms of their cultural embedding (norms, values, beliefs) and/or their institutional domain (for
Today’s global competition forces manufacturing companies to re-evaluate their existing processes, technologies, manufactured parts and services in order to focus on strategic activities. The question whether to make or to buy goods or services represents a problem faced by many companies when deciding between keeping technologies/processes in-house or purchasing them from an outside supplier. In
Economic contacts between countries have steadily increased over the years. This in part reflects the rapid growth of international economy and the increased investment in several countries. These international business activities have led to the formation of a group of company conducting business activities in two or more countries, which is known as MNEs or multinational enterprises. Nowadays
Corporate Social Responsibility is today a recognised concept companies have to act on in order to meet the stakeholders’ increased demands. An increased environmental debate in the society as well as increased regulations requires companies to focus on environmental questions to a greater extent than before. Companies need to control their environmental performance and focus on their significant
The debate over Corporate Social Responsibility is present in many parts of society. The business sector’s engagement in CSR has increased rapidly during the last decades. One important question this brings out is how CSR should be governed. The debate consists in large of two views – CSR should be regulated by law or forced regulation or CSR should be managed through private and civil regulation
Background: Somali piracy and armed robbery against ships remain to be one of the major global concerns today. Since 2007, over 1,500 piracy and piratical attacks were reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre. These figures were gradually increased over the years, along with the degree of maritime violence. Somali pirates, with the urge of ransom payments, have consequently become more threate
Neoliberalism, as a loosely defined set of political beliefs, calls for more individual freedom and autonomy, resulting in increased responsibility for each person to address major societal issues. ‘Individualization’ is the process by which responsibility for addressing major environmental issues such as climate change is placed on individuals. In this thesis I investigate whether individualizati
Growing evidence shows that alcohol triggers paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (PAF) in some patients. How-ever, there is a lack of methods for assessing the causality between triggers and atrial fibrillation (AF) episodes. Accordingly, this work aims to develop an approach to episode modeling under the influence of alcohol for the purpose of evaluating causality assessment methods. The alternating,
Imaging of stellar surfaces in visible wavelengths is one of the current frontiers in astronomy. With a few exceptions, stars can not be seen in visible light as anything but point objects with current technology. Being able to properly image stars would open up the door to a vast field of new discoveries, permitting direct studies of phenomena such as rotationally deformed stars, circumstellar di
This thesis deals with collusion risks in e-commerce markets based on an analysis of economic theory on structural factors facilitating collusion and empirical findings from studies and case law. It further offers an analysis of the legal status of any such collusion and a discussion on competition policy in relation to it. Whereas the legal rules governing collusion in Article 81(1) of the EC Tre
Given a directed graph as input, we show how to efficiently find a shortest (directed, simple) cycle on an even number of vertices. As far as we know, no polynomial-time algorithm was previously known for this problem. In fact, finding any even cycle in a directed graph in polynomial time was open for more than two decades until Robertson, Seymour, and Thomas (Ann. of Math. (2) 1999) and, independ
Background: In recent years, a lot of effort has been put in the enhancement of medical imaging using artificial intelligence. However, limited patient data in combination with the unavailability of a ground truth often pose a challenge to a systematic validation of such methodologies. The goal of this work was to investigate a recently proposed method for an artificial intelligence-based generati
Purpose – The purpose of this article is to investigate attempts to safeguard classical humanism in secondary schools by appealing to a cultural-historical link with Antiquity, voiced in the face of educational reforms in Sweden between 1865 and 1971.Design/methodology/approach – By focusing on the content of the pedagogical journal Pedagogisk Tidskrift, the article highlights a number of examples
To accommodate surplus energy, the adipose tissue expands by increasing adipocyte size (hypertrophy) and number (hyperplasia). The presence of hypertrophic adipocytes is a key characteristic of adipose tissue dysfunction. High-fat diet (HFD) fed C57BL/6J mice are a commonly used model to study obesity and obesity-related complications. In the present study, we have characterized adipose plasticity
Positioning using wave signal measurements is used in several applications, such as GPS systems, structure from sound and Wifi based positioning. Mathematically, such problems require the computation of the positions of receivers and/or transmitters as well as time offsets if the devices are unsynchronized. In this paper, we expand the previous state-of-the-art on positioning formulations by intro
