Using publicly listed firms in the UK, we examine the time-series variation of investment-cash flow sensitivity after directly controlling for future growth opportunities in cash flow, which if overlooked, as in the literature, could bias inferences. We find that investment-cash flow sensitivity is disappearing over time, even for constrained firms during the global financial crisis when credit constraints were more significant or binding. Our results not only confirm the decline in investment-cash flow sensitivity that is not explained by factors so far identified in the literature but also its diminishing usefulness as a proxy of financial constraints.

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Modern Supply Chains are critical in terms of efficiency, economic activities and commercial impact, particularly in case of security incidents. Inland terminals, commercial ports and dry ports constitute key gateways for the transportation flows in these modern supply chains and are require enhanced security procedures. This paper develops a framework that facilitates the sharing of information among various supply chain stakeholders, which is expected to improve the security level from a value chain perspective. In this context, we propose the upgrade of the current security strategies utilizing existing processes, equipment in order to minimize time and cost currently needed but more importantly improving the level of security in the supply chain. A conceptual rule and role-based data fusion framework is developed enabling the seamless and timely exchange of messages. The proposed Data Fusion Framework has a simple architecture that supports quick integration to either network-based, distributed systems or conventional stand-alone systems and adheres to common data fusion principles. The proposed framework considers different components (e.g. sensors, algorithms and fusing procedures) in an equipment agnostic approach so as to enable easy access and easy usage of security information.

Given its unsustainable growth, the food packaging industry (FPI) has become a priority industry in the circular economy. Given the academic significance attributed to the gradations of circularity in maximising resource efficiency in the food packaging industry, this paper aims to identify the current state of the application of those gradations of circularity in the FPI by finding the least and most commonly used circular strategies in the FPI. Moreover, it aims to identify the drivers of and barriers to the implementation of the gradations of circularity and the levers for overcoming such barriers through SLR using multiple case studies, namely five small-medium enterprises (SMEs) in the FPI that each represent one of the five least implemented circular strategies. The research identified that the efforts of the FPI toward adopting circular strategies were not aligned with the gradations of circularity. Based on the research findings, a lever–barrier matrix is proposed as a toolkit for SMEs planning a transition toward the circular economy or are in the transition phase.

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