Insights from Annual General Meetings

This thesis consists of five empirical studies, all relating to shareholder activism at annual general meetings. The first study concerns the structure and content of general meetings in Denmark and Sweden comparatively. The paper reveals significant differences in the level of activism, with Swedish investors being the most active in terms of proposals, proxy voting, and ‘voice’. The paper takes a legal approach, and discusses divergence in activism levels from the perspective of shareholder prerequisites to engage in monitoring efforts. Further, the paper investigating the topics addressed through questions and opinions. The results show that matters which can be categorized as irrelevant are reasonably rare. This is an important finding, as suggestions to abolish general meetings have often been based on the assumption that general meetings facilitate nothing but irrelevant, time consuming, and costly discussions that serves no monitoring function. The second study analyses the impact of voting power on shareholder activism. We hypothesize that there is a positive relationship between shareholder activism and a measure of the largest shareholder’s sensitivity to increased participation by small shareholders and find that firms’ amenability to small shareholder influence leads to more proposals by the nomination committee, but fewer proposals by other shareholders. We interpret this as evidence that the shareholder elected nomination committees effectively channel shareholder concerns and preempt other kinds of activism. Politicians and companies that desire active shareholders could improve the amenability of firms to shareholder influence by ownership transparency, shareholder committees, and contacts with shareholder associations and other vehicles for collective action..

Representability of the local motivic Brouwer degree

We study which quadratic forms are representable as the local degree of a map f:An→An with an isolated zero at 0 , following the work of Kass and Wickelgren who established the connection to the quadratic form of Eisenbud, Khimshiashvili, and Levine. Our main observation is that over some base fields k , not all quadratic forms are representable as a local degree. Empirically the local degree of a map f:An→An has many hyperbolic summands, and we prove that in fact this is the case for local degrees of low rank. We establish a complete classification of the quadratic forms of rank at most 7 that are representable as the local degree of a map over all base fields of characteristic different from 2 . The number of hyperbolic summands was also studied by Eisenbud and Levine, where they establish general bounds on the number of hyperbolic forms that must appear in a quadratic form that is representable as a local degree. Our proof method is elementary and constructive in the case of rank 5 local degrees, while the work of Eisenbud and Levine is more general. We provide further families of examples that verify that the bounds of Eisenbud and Levine are tight in several cases

Assessment of dietary intake of nicotinic acid and nicotinamide in relation to tolerable upper intake levels. Opinion of the Panel on Nutrition, Dietetic Products, Novel Food and Allergy of the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety. VKM report 2017:27

The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety (Vitenskapskomiteen for mattrygghet, VKM) has,at the request of the Norwegian Food Safety Authority (Mattilsynet; NFSA), assessed the intake of niacin in the Norwegian population. NFSA has also requested that VKM conduct scenario calculations to illustrate the consequences of establishing separate maximum limits for nicotinic acid(1, 4, 8 or 10 mg/day)and nicotinamide (100, 500, 700 or 900mg/day)in food supplements, by assessing these scenarios against existing tolerable upper intake levels (ULs).The current maximum limit for niacin added to food supplements is 32mg/day, including nicotinic acid, nicotinamide and inositol hexanicotinate.publishedVersio

Assessment of vitamin B6 intake in relation to tolerable upper intake Levels. Opinion of the Panel on Nutrition, Dietetic Products, Novel Food and Allergy of the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety

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Assessment of zinc intake in relation to tolerable upper intake Levels. Opinion of the Panel on Nutrition, Dietetic Products, Novel Food and Allergy of the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety

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Assessment of iron intake in relation to tolerable upper intake Levels. Opinion of the Panel on Nutrition, Dietetic Products, Novel Food and Allergy of the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety

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Assessment of selenium intake in relation to tolerable upper intake levels. Opinion of the Panel on Nutrition, Dietetic Products, Novel Food and Allergy of the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety. VKM Report 2017:20

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Assessment of copper intake in relation to tolerable upper intake Levels. Opinion of the Panel on Nutrition, Dietetic Products, Novel Food and Allergy of the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety. VKM Report 2017:19

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Benefit and risk assessment of iodization of household salt and salt used in bread and bakery products. Scientific opinion of the Panel on Nutrition, Dietetic Products, Novel Food and Allergy of the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food and Environment

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