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3890 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2026

CSRIndeX: A Python tool for computing normative CSR benchmarks from SEC filings

Aparna Raj C, Sundaravalli Narayanaswami

Measuring corporate social responsibility (CSR) remains empirically challenging due to the lack of standardised, comparable data on firms’ social and environmental expenditures. While corporate disclosures increasingly reference sustainability and responsibility, actual CSR spending is rarely reported in a consistent, machine-readable format. This paper introduces CSRIndeX, an open-source Python software that addresses this gap by combining disclosure-based CSR measurement with normative spending benchmarks derived from firm profitability. CSRIndeX automatically retrieves Form 10-K filings from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), extracts CSR-related narrative disclosures, and computes coverage-based disclosure breadth (Disclosure Quality, DQ) and thematic balance metrics. In parallel, the software retrieves firm-level net income from the SEC XBRL Company Facts API. It calculates user-defined normative CSR spending targets as a proportion of fiscal-year profits. By explicitly separating descriptive disclosure metrics from normative benchmarks, CSRIndeX provides a transparent and reproducible framework for empirical analysis of CSR, policy evaluation, and comparative research at the firm level.

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Working Papers | 2026

Spiritual Leadership: One More Leadership Style? Should We Care? Absolutely!

Reema Nayyar, Neharika Vohra, Rupashree Baral

Most leaders search for ways to improve how employees grow and perform as a team and, in turn, improve organizational performance.  Advice on how to lead well—heroically and successfully—is a dime a dozen. The current context, variously defined as brittle, anxious, uncertain, nonlinear, and incomprehensible, makes people anxious and fearful, which, in turn, prevents them from flowing. Amid the chaos and unprecedented change, the need for leaders to engage with their people is greater than ever.  We believe that one conceptualization of leadership formed over the last 25 years, spiritual leadership (SL), can serve as an anchor to help leaders make headway in the current context.  However, SL is also a concept that is poorly understood and often rejected before its usefulness is evaluated.

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Working Papers | 2026

One Person Companies in India: A Decadal Assessment 2014-2024

Megha Tiwari and M P Ram Mohan

One Person Company (OPC) was introduced in India under the Companies Act, 2013, and registrations began in 2014 with the first official data release in 2015. An OPC is defined as a company that has a single shareholder. By design, OPCs are meant to offer sole proprietors the benefits of a corporate structure, including a separate legal identity, limited liability, the ability to convert into other types of companies, along with minimal administrative burdens and compliance requirements. OPCs, have been in existence for over a decade, and amendments to the law are now being contemplated. This study outlines the legal framework governing OPCs and undertakes an empirical analysis of key performance parameters over the ten-year period from 2014 to 2024.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Dynamic order assignment under warehouse disruption risks: A switching-curve policy, heuristics, and insights

Govind Lal Kumawat, Debjit Roy

E-commerce order fulfillment is increasingly disrupted by natural events such as pandemics, hurricanes, and floods. This study investigates order assignment decisions considering warehouse disruption risk, order-class priority, and shipping costs. We develop a stochastic dynamic programming model for the order assignment problem. Our analysis reveals a switching-curve policy for order assignment. We find that disruption risk significantly affects the order assignment decision, with optimal switching thresholds decreasing as the disruption rate increases. To efficiently compute these thresholds, we develop three index-based heuristic policies. Among them, our improvement heuristic achieves an average optimality gap of 7.21%, outperforming the myopic policy (8.48%) and the least shipping cost heuristic (14.17%). Through a comprehensive numerical study, we uncover several important insights. Disruption and recovery rates have nonlinear effects on order fulfillment costs. Specifically, while investing in mechanisms to enhance recovery speed is beneficial, the gains become progressively smaller as recovery becomes faster. Additionally, shared order-processing capacity at warehouses with class-wise priority can prove a more effective strategy than maintaining dedicated capacities for each order class. This research provides actionable strategies for managing e-commerce fulfillment under warehouse disruption risks, enhancing operational efficiency and cost management.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Gender gap in commute time allocation: analyzing the effects of major life events and urban–rural differences using India’s time use survey

Sandip Chakrabarti, Sagar Verma, Muskan Verma

Gender differences in time use have been studied extensively, thereby informing gender-inclusive policymaking. Differences appear at young ages and change with major life events such as employment, migration, marriage, and childbirth. Since time allocation across activities determines well-being, researchers have analyzed the causes and consequences of such differences to promote multidimensional gender equality. However, although the importance of context-specific analysis of gender gaps in time allocation to commuting and other work-related travel has been emphasized in the literature, countries across the developing world remain relatively less studied. We use India’s Time Use Survey and consider a sample of 24,780 employed persons belonging to 13,501 single-member households or dual-earner nuclear married couple households with or without children to investigate the gender difference in commute time allocation. We find that, relative to men, women allocate significantly less time to commuting. Moreover, this “gender commute gap” is statistically significant in households with young children and persists even in households with older children. An intra-household analysis reveals that the gap is smaller in urban than rural areas, and that intra-household gender differences in unpaid domestic work and childcare responsibilities are associated with the gap within households. Closing the gender commute gap is imperative.

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Working Papers | 2026

Non-Compete and Non-Solicitation Clauses

M P Ram Mohan, Siddhartha Shukla, Tom Lyle and Prem Vinod Parwani

This note provides an overview of non-compete and non-solicitation clauses, contrasting Indian law with key principles and considerations under English law. It examines the doctrinal framework under Section 27 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, on the restraint of trade. It shows how there are differing thresholds of enforceability of non-compete and non-solicitation clauses, depending on whether they appear in employment or commercial contexts. It then compares India’s doctrinal framework with other common law jurisdictions, with a particular focus on the English common law “reasonableness” framework that governs the enforceability of non-compete and non-solicitation clauses in the UK. The article concludes by demonstrating litigation and enforceability challenges of these types of clauses, along with suggestions for practitioners to strategically address them.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Exploration, Confirmation, and Replication in the Same Observational Study: A Two Team Cross-Screening Approach to Studying the Effect of Unwanted Pregnancy on Mothers’ Later Life Outcomes

Samrat Roy, Marina Bogomolov, Ruth Heller, Amy M. Claridge, Tishra Beeson, Dylan S. Small

The long-term consequences of unwanted pregnancies carried to term on mothers have not been explored much. We use data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) and propose a novel approach, namely two team cross-screening, to study the possible effects of unwanted pregnancies carried to term on various aspects of mothers’ later life mental health, physical health, economic well-being, and life satisfaction. Our approach, unlike existing approaches to observational studies, enables investigators to perform exploratory data analysis, confirmatory data analysis, and replication in the same study. This is a valuable property when there is only one data set available with unique strengths. In two team cross-screening, the investigators split themselves into two teams and the data is split as well according to a meaningful covariate. Each team then performs an exploratory data analysis on its part of the data to design an analysis plan for the other part of the data. The complete freedom of the teams in designing the analysis has the potential to generate new unanticipated hypotheses in addition to a prefixed set of hypotheses. Moreover, only the hypotheses that looked promising in the data each team explored are forwarded for analysis (thus alleviating the multiple testing problem). These advantages are demonstrated in our study of the effects of unwanted pregnancies on mothers’ later life outcomes.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Who exits and who stays in an organization? Core technological knowledge and inventor exit

Mayank Varshney, Amit Jain

A firm's inventors are repositories of its core expertise that constitutes its competitive advantage. This knowledge is subject to erosion when an inventor exits the firm. Little is known, however, about what makes an inventor with core knowledge susceptible to exit. We develop a model of exit in which inventor knowledge may be core, unique, and complex, which determines the likelihood of her or his exit from a firm. We study inventor exit from IBM using a long panel of USPTO data (1975–2010) and find that an inventor with core knowledge is more likely to exit from IBM when she or he has more unique and less complex knowledge. These factors also determine whether the inventor subsequently joins a rival firm or a non–rival firm.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Product Availability, Buying Behavior, and Marketing Action: Insights From a Bottom of the Pyramid Marketplace

Shehzala, Vidya Vemireddy, Anand Kumar Jaiswal

It is argued that improving access to products and services can increase the material well-being of BoP consumers. However, little is known about the kind of products available or consumed at the BoP, particularly if they are essential or non-essential, and the implications of their consumption for a consumer segment with limited resources. BoP ventures have also been criticized for creating economic value for the firm without truly creating social value for BoP consumers, but extant literature includes anecdotal or qualitative evidence, and there is a need for quantitative data on products available and consumed at the retail store level in a BoP marketplace. We address these questions in the present study. Using a mixed-methods research design combining store-level quantitative purchase data (n = 170 individuals over 1 month) with qualitative interviews, we examine product availability and consumption in a BoP marketplace. We find that a majority of available and consumed products are non-essential, with consumption driven by exposure to advertisements, celebrity appeals, lower entry prices and strong distribution. These findings suggest that while marketing actions increase access and consumption, the dominance of non-essential goods limits their potential for meaningful social value creation. We further offer recommendations on how organizations can enhance value creation for the BoP through product, pricing, promotional and distribution strategies

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Working Papers | 2026

Trade-Dress Law in India

M P Ram Mohan, Pratishtha Agarwal

The increased emphasis on visual presentation and brand experience has elevated trade-dress from a peripheral concern to a central feature of trademark protection. Indian trade-dress protection is currently spread across multiple intellectual property legal regime with special emphasis through the passing-off law under the trademarks Act 1999. Despite commercial importance of trade-dress law, and without explicit statutory definition of what constitutes trade-dress, its protection is shaped almost entirely through a patchwork of judicial interpretation across the Supreme Court and the High Courts. The present study undertakes a mapping and comparative analysis of trade-dress jurisprudence across the Supreme Court of India and four major High Courts; Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. The analysis reveals a fragmented landscape highlighting divergent judicial approaches to distinctiveness, consumer perception, functionality and evidentiary thresholds, The present study further identifies persistent doctrinal tensions from the conflation of trade-dress with copyright and design law in the Indian context. The authors argue for a more disciplined and coherent framework for trade-dress protection in India.

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IIMA