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743 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2024

The origin of return correlation networks

Anirban Banerjee, Arnab Chakrabarti, Anindya S. Chakrabarti

Financial networks are constructed from asset price comovements. There is a large literature that takes these networks as given, for example, for portfolio optimization. But what exactly is the origin of these networks? We exploit a unique database with matched asset price and order imbalance data, allowing us to observe the trade orders placed and reveal excess demands along with the resulting prices. Empirically, we find that order imbalance comovement has a positive and statistically significant effect on return comovement. Filtering out the latent market factors from both order imbalance and return leads to a drastic drop in explanatory power. We infer that the market factor of order imbalance is the primary driver of return comovement—robust to model specifications as well as fixed effects. We present complementary results with market volatility and the decomposition of traders in terms of strategic heterogeneity. Our work brings forth the role of order imbalance networks in explaining asset return networks.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Contesting social responsibilitiesof business: Centring context, experience, and relationality

Premilla D’Cruz, Nolywé Delannon, Arno Kourula, Lauren McCarthy, Jeremy Moon, Laura J Spence

This introduction, and the special issue on ‘Contesting social responsibilities of business: Experiences in context’ it frames, addresses the neglected question of the experience of contestation in the terrain of the social responsibilities of business. It re-conceptualises the social responsibilities of business by advancing research grounded in a relational perspective, exploring and highlighting different forms of contestation of these social responsibilities, and centring the role of context by focusing especially on contestation in overlooked geographical settings and sites of marginalisation. Contextualising contestation in this way centres silenced and/or ignored voices, generates meaningful theory, and offers an innovative critical lens on business–society relations.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Technology-enabled agent choice and uptake of social assistance programs: Evidence from India’s food security program

Rakesh Allu, Maya Ganesh, Sarang Deo, Sripad K Devalkar

Problem definition: Beneficiaries of social assistance programs with transfers of undifferentiated commodities often have a designated agent to collect their entitlements from. This gives monopoly power to agents over beneficiaries. When coupled with weak government monitoring, agents do not have incentives to adhere to stipulated operating guidelines, leading to reduced uptake by beneficiaries. Some governments are attempting to break the monopoly by allowing beneficiaries to choose agents. However, the impact of choice on uptake may be limited by lack of alternate agents in beneficiaries’ vicinities, restricted ability of agents to compete with undifferentiated commodities, and collusion among agents. Methodology/results: Using a reverse difference-in-differences framework on data from a food security program in two neighboring states in India, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, we find that providing agent choice results in a 6.6% increase in the quantity of entitlements collected by the beneficiary households. We also find that increase in uptake is about four times higher in regions with high agent density compared with those with low agent density. This emphasizes the importance of having an alternate agent in the vicinity for choice to be effective. Nearly all of the increase in uptake is attributable to new beneficiaries collecting entitlements from their preassigned agent. This is suggestive of agents improving adherence to operating guidelines in response to choice. We find associative evidence for this response in the number of days agents keep their shops open. Managerial implications: Governments executing in-kind transfers of undifferentiated commodities are piloting interventions to provide choice to their beneficiaries. Replacement of in-kind transfers with cash, an increasingly popular intervention, may be challenging in volatile markets, as the magnitude of the transfer needs to be periodically adjusted. Our results indicate that alternate designs of providing choice even in a limited form, that is, the place where the beneficiaries can collect their entitlements with products and prices fixed, can present a viable alternative.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Leveraging digital technology to improve monitoring and planning in public sector supply chains: Evidence from India’s food security program

Maya Ganesh, Sarang Deo, Sripad K Devalkar

Governments across the developing world are adopting digital technologies to improve the performance of public sector supply chains. However, empirical evidence regarding the impact of these technologies on performance is mixed. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of using biometric authentication (BA) devices on the performance of India’s food security program. The program aims to deliver subsidized food grains to nearly 160 million low-income households through approximately 500,000 fair price shops (FPSs). Nearly half of those grains do not reach the beneficiaries and are diverted to the open market for private benefit. We estimate the impact of installing BA devices on reducing diversion in more than 3,300 FPSs in the Indian state of Karnataka between 2013 and 2015 using a difference-in-differences approach. We find that BA devices reduce up to 4% of the current diversion at the last mile. We argue that this relatively low impact is due to the presence of a workaround mechanism which results in imperfect monitoring and validate the decrease in diversion mechanism by estimating the differential impact of BA devices. We complement the empirical analysis with a simulation exercise to estimate the additional value that can be unlocked by using the BA devices. We find that the value of better replenishment planning using sales and inventory information captured by BA devices can be significant. The value of better planning can be as high as six times the value of reduction in diversion, depending on the preintervention levels of demand from genuine beneficiaries and diversion at the FPSs.

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Journal Articles | 2024

One nation, one ration, limited interstate traction: Migration and PDS portability in India

Chinmay Tumbe, Rahul Kumar Jha

The One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC) scheme started in India in 2019—with all states on board since mid-2022—enabling interstate portability of the public distribution system (PDS) for migrants to access subsidised foodgrains. This article reviews the progress of the policy so far, compares interstate PDS portability with intrastate PDS portability, and identifies key ONORC districts where offtake appears to be occurring frequently. It documents the limited traction of interstate PDS portability with less than half a million monthly transactions, in stark contrast to over 20 million monthly transactions being conducted under the umbrella of intrastate portability. Both demand- and supply-side factors appear to be at work in constraining the ONORC interstate PDS portability at present and easing these constraints could substantially increase the adoption of the benefits. These measures include better stock management at fair price shops considering the intra-year seasonality of migration and focus on specific migration corridors through publicity campaigns targeted towards migrant workers.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Gold in household portfolios during a pandemic: Evidence from India

Oindrila Chatterjee, Balagopal Gopalakrishnan, Sanket Mohapatra

This paper examines how Indian households allocate their savings portfolio across gold, financial assets, and cash during the COVID-19 crisis. Our study relies on an extensive household survey in 142 districts across 21 states in India conducted during the 2020–2021 financial year. We find that the portfolio allocation of households in districts with a higher incidence of COVID-19 shifted towards gold during the pandemic compared to households in other districts. The shift towards gold is accompanied by a shift away from financial assets and other assets (primarily cash). A similar shift towards gold is observed for districts that experienced the most adverse economic impact—as measured by lower night-time lights intensity—during the pandemic. Households in districts with greater banking access and better health infrastructure show a smaller shift towards gold. A panel estimation with normal and COVID-19 period surveys confirms the baseline results. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the role of economic crisis in shaping the financial decisions of households.

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Journal Articles | 2024

To integrate or not? Understanding knowledge integration of target firm

Mayank Varshney,

Technology acquisition is a common phenomenon of acquiring external knowledge, but we have a limited understanding of conditions in which the acquirer integrates the target or not. On one hand, the acquirer may have a policy to integrate the target to benefit from its prior knowledge. On the other hand, the target may face challenges in continuing its knowledge creation and the acquirer may want to provide it autonomy to not disrupt it. This paper aims to identify conditions in which targets tend to be less integrated after acquisitions, allowing them to maintain more autonomy and contribute more to knowledge creation.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Integrated inventory replenishment and online demand allocation decisions for an omnichannel retailer with ship-from-store strategy

Vishal Bansal, Arnab Bisi, Debjit Roy, Prahalad Venkateshan

Retailing has changed dramatically from single-channel brick-and-mortar stores to multi-channel and omnichannel retailers over the last few decades. Omnichannel retailers employ different strategies to integrate online and offline sales channels as well as order fulfillment processes. Among these strategies, the ship-from-store is the most popular and widely accepted among retailers. It enables retailers to use inventory from store locations to fulfill online demand. An omnichannel retailer with a distribution center and a retail store has to make important, interlinked decisions — (1) how much inventory to keep at the retail store, and (2) where to fulfill the online demand from and how much. In this work, we model the integrated inventory replenishment and online demand allocation decisions for an omnichannel retailer employing the ship-from-store strategy. We analyze this problem for both single-period and multi-period settings. We extend the analytical framework of the single-period problem by providing a finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP) formulation for the multi-period problem. Our findings suggest that for a single-period setting, decentralized inventory replenishment and demand allocation system maximizes the profit of the omnichannel retailer for low values of the incentive for fulfilling the online demand through store inventory, while for sufficiently high values of the incentive, a pooled system provides the optimal profit. An increment in the discount factor has the same effect on the optimal decisions in a multi-period setting as that of salvage value in a single-period setting for a given value of the incentive for the ship-from-store strategy. We also provide several extensions (such as cross selling, endogenous and correlated demand streams) of our analytical framework for the multi-period problem.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Can biofuels help achieve sustainable development goals in India? A systematic review

Prantika Das, Chandan Kumar Jha, Satyam Saxena, Ranjan Kumar Ghosh

Biofuels are expected to play a pivotal role in developing economies' transition towards net-zero emissions. However, their promotion can cause multifaceted sustainability concerns. National biofuel policies often align with the optimistic discourse surrounding biofuels but may lack comprehensive measures to simultaneously address all sustainability risks. This study conducts a systematic review to evaluate the sustainability performance of biofuels and examines their implications for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A total of 12 sustainability indicators were identified as economic, social, and environmental priorities. Biofuel linkages with 8 SDGs, 21 targets, and 22 indicators were mapped. The analysis revealed a wider coverage of sustainability impacts associated with biodiesel compared to ethanol feedstocks for India. Notably, the sustainability effects of biofuels exhibited considerable variability across different spatial scales. Irrespective of the biofuel types, negative sustainability outcomes were found to be associated with socio-economic indicators related to food security, livelihood, and income, and environmental indicators like land use. Positive sustainability effects were observed for environmental indicators like water and soil quality, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. The study identifies policy gaps in addressing localized adverse effects of biofuels, emphasizing the need to align biofuel strategies with SDGs for more comprehensive and sustainable biofuel development in developing countries.

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Journal Articles | 2024

The Ethical, Societal, and Global Implications of Crowdsourcing Research.

Shuili Du, Mayowa T. Babalola, Premilla D’Cruz, Edina Dóci, Lucia Garcia-Lorenzo, Louise Hassan, Gazi Islam, Alexander Newman, Ernesto Noronha & Suzanne van Gils

Online crowdsourcing platforms have rapidly become a popular source of data collection. Despite the various advantages these platforms offer, there are substantial concerns regarding not only data validity issues, but also the ethical, societal, and global ramifications arising from the prevalent use of online crowdsourcing platforms. This paper seeks to expand the dialogue by examining both the “internal” aspects of crowdsourcing research practices, such as data quality issues, reporting transparency, and fair compensation, and the “external” aspects, in terms of how the widespread use of crowdsourcing data collection shapes the nature of scientific communities and our society in general. Online participants in research studies are informal workers who provide labor in exchange for remuneration. The paper thus highlights the need for researchers to consider the markedly different political, economic, and socio-cultural characteristics of the Global North and the Global South when undertaking crowdsourcing research involving an international sample; such consideration is crucial for both increasing research validity and mitigating societal inequities. We encourage researchers to scrutinize the value systems underlying this popular data collection research method and its associated ethical, societal, and global ramifications, as well as provide a set of recommendations regarding the use of crowdsourcing platforms.

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