This doctoral thesis examines the causes and effects of corporate disclosure practices. The thesis consists of four independent but related essays that collectively make up a country study for Sweden. The first essay aims to explain why some firms have a proactive disclosure strategy while others devote less resources and effort to disclosure and investor relations. Information about Swedish firms

Immune defences are undoubtedly of great benefit to the host, reducing the impact of infectious organisms. However, mounting immune responses also entails costs, which may be measured by inducing immune responses against artificial infections. We injected common eider (Somateria mollissima) females with three different non-pathogenic antigens, sheep red blood cells (SRBC), diphtheria toxoid and te

We show that experimental data are in very good agreement with predictions from the string fragmentation model by Bowler and Morris. We present a physical interpretation and discuss the relation to results obtained from Perturbative QCD and Local Hadron Parton Duality (LPHD). We also present implications for Bp correlations and the possibility to use these as a tag to study CP violation in B decay

For the generation of sound, some woodwind musical instruments, e.g. oboe, bassoon, clarinet and saxophone, are provided with mouthpieces made from reeds. These reeds are the culms of Arundo donax, a tall, cane-like perennial grass. A general problem is that the material is of varying quality, yet externally differences cannot be observed. Hence, large proportions of the prepared reeds are unusabl

IL-10 is a pleiotropic cytokine with stimulatory and inhibitory properties, and is thought to have a protective role in rheumatoid arthritis and collagen-induced arthritis (CIA). In this study, we investigated how IL-10 deficiency affects CIA and anti-collagen type II (CII) Ab-transferred arthritis in C57BL/10.Q (B10.Q) mice. The B10.Q.IL-10(-/-) mice had an 8-cM 129/Ola fragment around the IL-10

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) remain a significant clinical problem, despite antibiotic treatment and surgical correction of reflux and malformations. Here we propose that novel molecular tools may be applied to modernize and individualize the diagnosis and therapy of UTI. Determinants of bacterial virulence and host resistance are relatively well understood at the molecular level, and technolog

We have developed a new reactive force field, ReaxFF, for use in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to investigate the structures and reactive dynamics of complex metal oxide catalysts. The parameters in ReaxFF are derived directly from QM and have been validated to provide reasonable accuracy for a wide variety of reactions. We report the use of ReaxFF to study the activation and conversion of p

New measurements of radiative lifetimes of four 3d65s levelsin Fe II at about 10 eV are presented along with absolute oscillator strengths for twenty 4p-5s transitions involving the four levels. The experimental measurements are compared with two different sets oftheoretical calculations. The lines are of particular interest in the modeling of HLyalpha pumped fluorescence of Fe II in astrophysical

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The filtering, prediction and smoothing problems as well as the linear quadratic control problems can very generally be formulated as operator equations using basic linear algebra. The equations are of Fredholm type II and difficult to solve directly. It is shown how the operator can be factorized into two Volterra operators using a matrix Riccati equation. Recursive solution of these triangular o

A derivation for a polarized CCFM evolution equation which is suitable to describe the scaling behavior of the unintegrated polarized gluon density is given. We discuss the properties of this polarized CCFM equation and compare it to the standard CCFM equation in the unpolarized case.