Companies' early-stage research and development efforts are extremely uncertain and research has often argued that companies should form one technology-development alliance at a time to see if a new technology may have potential. The drawback of such a sequential approach is that companies are left empty-handed in case that one alliance does not produce any results.

The portfolio perspective as proposed in this research instead argues that in the face of severe uncertainty, companies should engage in multiple simultaneous alliances in order to distinguish quickly between technological dead-ends and promising new technologies.

In inflationary environments, companies can avoid paying cash dividends to their shareholders. Instead they give them free shares, referred to as bonus distributions. This issue has not been analysed in previous studies, partly because the inflation in many western countries is relatively low and stable.

In this study, the market valuation of this unusual form of stock dividends was assessed, this was carried out by transferring the accumulated equity reserves, mainly the inflation revaluation equity reserves, to paid-in capital leaving the total equity unchanged.

Although supply chain finance appears to offer a win-win-win proposition for buyers, suppliers and banks, buyers have been reluctant to adopt these solutions. It has been suggested that accounting requirements on supply chain finance render its adoption unattractive for buyers through reclassification of accounts payable to debt, thus increasing the debt held by the buyer on their balance sheet.

To investigate whether this is indeed the case, preliminary research was carried out through interviews with four financial organisations.

From 1990 to 2005, a number of Eastern European countries became an attractive region for investments. This paper looks at 15 of those countries and aims to estimate debt rescheduling probabilities by using a set of macroeconomic, financial and political variables.

This research is of particular relevance to policy makers, institutional and private foreign investors to investigate determinants or debt rescheduling probabilities in those countries.