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821 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2019

The Punjab National Bank scam: Ethics versus robust processes

Sundaravalli Narayanaswami, Kaushik Dora Hanumantu, and Vidula Worlikar

Journal of Public Affairs

With the rising incidents of corporate scams, it has become imperative to lift the corporate veil to unearth the reasons behind them. As a result, it is of paramount importance to examine the formation of the companies entering into the contract—the executives, directors, and top management. A large-scale scam hit the Punjab National Bank (PNB) in India recently with huge implications on its financial position and credibility. It is inferred through this work that violation of checks and balances led to the huge scam. Following this scam, several banks have initiated measures to prevent and early detect such manipulative practices. Banks have incorporated stringent verification of all stakeholders involved in any transaction and do not completely rely anymore on the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications system. The Reserve Bank of India, as the apex governing body of all banking agencies in India, has also started taking measures to ensure that monitoring and control mechanisms are strong and robust. Finally, we present the way forward to prevent malpractices in the corporate world and the ethical implications in the society. Although any organization, especially, a public service organization does not allow any perpetrators into its systems, loopholes might exist that its internal or external stakeholders take advantage of. While emphasizing the needs for robust monitoring and audit processes to prevent violation by perpetrators, it is interesting to note that the same monitoring processes have brought out the scam to open for legal scrutiny, specifically at PNB.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Spirituality at workplace: As seen by Indian managers

Sunil Maheshwari and Rama Shankar Yadav

Indian Journal of Industrial Relations

The purpose of this article is to explore how spirituality is perceived by the managers in India.Thus, attributes of spiritual individuals and its impact at workplace are also explored. Qualitative thematic analysisof thirty in depth interviews was done to generate the unique Indian perspective on workplace spirituality. The participants in the interview process were full time managers of various Indian organizations holding positions like Vice President HR, Senior Manager HR etc. The major findings of the qualitative interviews were that workplace spirituality is a belief in sacred power which guides towards the ethical path. It helps in nurturing a positive, peaceful and compassionate environment at workplace.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Impact of regulatory framework on bidding behavior of firms: Policy implications for the oil & gas sector

Sunil Sharma and Mukesh Sud

Energy Policy

India's economy is heavily dependent on foreign oil with the country importing nearly 80% of its crude requirement. Consequently, government of India has been keen to encourage private investment in this sector through attractive policy frameworks. The earlier New Exploration Licensing Policy (1999–2015) has met with limited success, especially in the context of attracting multinational firms, necessitating its replacement with Open Acreage Licensing Policy. The factors that resulted in the limited success of a regulatory framework are not fully understood, especially the impact of firms bidding behavior. This paper adopts a qualitative approach to examine bidding decisions of four petroleum exploration firms across several bidding rounds from a resource picking mechanism perspective. Our findings suggest that uncertainties in the regulatory framework were exploited by the firms resulting in policy inefficacy. Our research identifies four variants of uncertainties and three types of aggressive bidding behavior. We recommend that in order to increase policy efficacy, there is a need to decrease stance uncertainty. Further adoption of a behavioral strategy lens to examine regulatory policy can inform the extant literature.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Female leaders and their response to the social environment

Lata Gangadharan, Tarun Jain, Pushkar Maitra, and Joseph Vecci

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

Using data from two sets of experiments conducted in rural India, this paper finds that relative to men, women assigned to be leaders contribute less than what they propose in a public goods game. We examine whether this behavior is influenced by the social environment. We find that female leaders deviate negatively from their proposals more frequently than males, when the gender of the leader is revealed and in villages with a female head assigned through an exogenous affirmative action policy. Women leaders anticipating lower economic and social costs for their actions compared to male leaders are potential explanations for observed gender differences in behavior. Our results suggest that the social environment can influence the behavior and the potential effectiveness of female leaders.

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Journal Articles | 2019

On robust estimates of correlated risk in cyber-insured IT firms: A first look at optimal AI-based estimates under “Small” data

Ranjan Pal, Leana Golubchik, Konstanations Psounis, and Tathagata Bandyopadhyay

ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems

In this article, we comment on the drawbacks of the existing AI-based Bayesian network (BN) cyber-vulnerability analysis (C-VA) model proposed in Mukhopadhyay et al. (2013) to assess cyber-risk in IT firms, where this quantity is usually a joint distribution of multiple risk (random) variables (e.g., quality of antivirus, frequency of monitoring, etc.) coming from heterogeneous distribution families. As a major modeling drawback, Mukhopadhyay et al. (2013) assume that any pair of random variables in the BN are linearly correlated with each other. This simplistic assumption might not always hold true for general IT organizational environments. Thus, the use of the C-VA model in general will result in loose estimates of correlated IT risk and will subsequently affect cyber-insurance companies in framing profitable coverage policies for IT organizations. To this end, we propose methods to (1) find a closed-form expression for the maximal correlation arising between pairs of discrete random variables, whose value finds importance in getting robust estimates of copula-induced computations of organizational cyber-risk, and (2) arrive at a computationally effective mechanism to compute nonlinear correlations among pairs of discrete random variables in the correlation matrix of the CBBN model (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2013). We also prove that an empirical computation of MC using our method converges rapidly, that is, exponentially fast, to the true correlation value in the number of samples. Our proposed method contributes to a tighter estimate of IT cyber-risk under environments of low-risk data availability and will enable insurers to better assess organizational risks and subsequently underwrite profitable cyber-insurance policies.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Regression models for group testing: Identifiability and asymptotics

Arindam Chatterjee and Tathagata Bandyopadhyay

Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference

Group testing has been widely used in epidemiology and related fields to estimate prevalence of rare diseases. Parametric binary regression models are used in group testing to estimate the covariate adjusted prevalence. Unlike the standard binary regression model (viz., logistic, complementary log–log, etc.), the regression model for group testing data connects the maximum of a group of independent binary responses to its covariate values. Recently, in group testing literature, it has been extensively used for estimating covariate adjusted prevalence of a disease making the tacit assumptions that (i) the regression model is identifiable, and (ii) the standard asymptotic theory is valid for the maximum likelihood estimators of the regression parameters. Verifying these assumptions is found to be non-trivial theoretical issues. In this paper, we give theoretical proofs of these assumptions under a set of simple sufficient conditions, thus, providing a theoretical justification for likelihood based inference on the regression parameters. We also provide an outline of the proof extending the asymptotic theory to the data obtained by Dorfman retesting, where all subjects in a positive group are retested.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Estimation of log-odds ratio from group testing data using Firth correction

Surupa Roy and Tathagata Banerjee

Biometrical Journal: Journal of Mathematical Methods in Biosciences

We consider the estimation of the prevalence of a rare disease, and the log-odds ratio for two specified groups of individuals from group testing data. For a low-prevalence disease, the maximum likelihood estimate of the log-odds ratio is severely biased. However, Firth correction to the score function leads to a considerable improvement of the estimator. Also, for a low-prevalence disease, if the diagnostic test is imperfect, the group testing is found to yield more precise estimate of the log-odds ratio than the individual testing.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Adapting the women's empowerment in agriculture index to specific country context: Insights and critiques from fieldwork in India

Soumya Gupta, Dhiraj Singh, Prabhu Pingali, and Vidya Vemireddy

Global Food Security

The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a direct, multi-dimensional measure of women's access to resources and decision-making in various domains of agriculture. However, several challenges characterize its use: adaptation of questionnaires to local agricultural contexts, modifications to index construction once underlying activities and adequacy thresholds are modified, and sensitivity analysis. In this paper, we address such challenges based on our experience of adapting and using the WEAI across 3600 households in India. In doing so we contribute to the methodological and technical base underlying the index, expand the WEAI evidence base for South Asia, and highlight the importance of tailoring the index to specific agricultural contexts in order to impact public policies in a meaningful way.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Nutritional outcomes of empowerment and market integration for women in rural India

Soumya Gupta, Vidya Vemireddy, and Prabhu Pingali

Food Security

Over half of all women of reproductive age are affected by anaemia in India. In this paper we study the role that both household market integration and women’s empowerment in agriculture can play in determining women’s dietary diversity. Our analysis is based on primary data from 3600 households across India on agriculture, nutrition and anthropometric outcomes. We account for market integration by way of per capita household purchases (quantity) of cereals and non- cereal food groups, such as pulses, meat/ fish/ poultry, fruits and vegetables, eggs and dairy. We construct an adapted version of the Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) that is context- specific and agriculture- oriented. After controlling for individual, household and village- level explanatory factors, we find that – for a given level of per capita market purchases – women who are empowered in their agricultural decisions have significantly higher dietary diversity scores relative to women who are disempowered of such decisions. More specifically it is women’s empowerment in two areas: input in production decisions and membership in self- help groups that supports this result. Women’s empowerment also enhances dietary diversity in the presence of disaggregated per capita purchases of non-cereals such as pulses, meat, dairy and eggs. This highlights the importance of reorienting India’s agricultural price and procurement policies beyond staple grains to ensure better dietary diversity.

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Journal Articles | 2019

Impostor phenomenon in STEM: occurrence, attribution, and identity

Devasmita Chakraverty

Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education

Purpose

This study aims to explore different themes related to impostor phenomenon, as experienced by graduate students and postdocs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

Design/methodology/approach

Open-ended survey responses from 120 US-based participants from 40 states and Washington, D.C., describing an occasion when they felt like an impostor, were analyzed thematically.

Findings

Following content analysis, three themes emerged: occurrence, attribution and identity. While impostor-like feelings were experienced as early as high school or college, the majority experienced it during PhD application, on being admitted to a PhD program and throughout PhD training. The people experiencing impostor phenomenon attributed their achievements and success to others (other’s name, prestige, or connections, other’s mistake, other’s lies or misrepresentation, or other’s kindness) or self (self-inadequacy, pretense, luck or self-doubt) rather than their own hard work or ability. Gender-based and race/ethnicity-based identity also shaped the experiences of the impostor phenomenon.

Research limitations/implications

Open-ended survey responses varied in length and level of detail. Responses provided a one-time snapshot of a memory related to impostor-feelings that stood out, not indicating if the feeling persisted or evolved with time. The findings are not generalizable over a larger population.

Originality/value

This study identified multiple themes related to the impostor phenomenon not investigated before, enriching existing research while also providing methodological rigor for the development of follow-up studies.

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