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743 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2017

How Costly is the Deliberate Disinflation in India? – Estimating the Sacrifice Ratio

Ravindra H. Dholakia and Kadiyala Sri Virinchi

Journal of Quantitative Economics

Methods followed in earlier studies for estimating the sacrifice ratio or the real cost of deliberate disinflation have focused only on aggregate supply side ignoring aggregate demand. The present study considers the adjustment path obtained as a locus of short run equilibria to arrive at a theoretically acceptable sacrifice ratio. The study uses quarterly data from the period between 1996-97Q1–2013-14Q4 in India and employs both the regression as well as the direct methods to estimate the ratio. The results have revealed a sacrifice ratio ranging from 1.7 to 3.8 depending on the method and the measure of inflation used. Such a magnitude of the real cost of disinflation in India, also relevant in the medium to long run, clearly contradicts the dominant view among policymakers that the trade-off, if any, is negligible. Deliberate disinflation policy needs to consider the real cost of sacrificing output and employment particularly when its magnitude is substantial.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Swot analysis of the Indian Economy in Economic Survey of India 2016-17

Ravindra H. Dholakia

Yojana

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Journal Articles | 2017

Framework for evolving spectrum management regimes: Lessons from India

Rekha Jain and Rishabh Dara

Telecommunications Policy

India has seen a marked change in spectrum policy over the past decade from a legacy administrative regime to a more market oriented one wherein it has adopted auctions in the primary market, trading in the secondary market and has liberalised spectrum to make it technology and service neutral. It has faced numerous challenges, constraints, and legacy issues in its transition, thus providing a rich context for analysis. Using the case study of India, we developed a framework that highlights the various dimensions to be considered while migrating from an administrative to a market regime for spectrum management. The framework also helps to assess the current orientation of a spectrum policy regime and provides a direction for adopting a higher market orientation. We used the framework in the Indian context to show that while India had adopted market mechanisms, it had a low level of market orientation.

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Journal Articles | 2017

This place is not the same anymore; temps are coming in

Saikat Chakraborty

Business Review India

As organisations increasingly rely on temporary work arrangements, there is a significant rise in the proportion of workers in part-time, contractual, fixed tenure, and other such labour engagements. Due to the difference between the employment relationships of temporary and permanent workers, corporations often design separate control mechanisms for these two worker groups. This paper argues that organisational control of workers extensively shapes their organisational communication. Communication as constitutive of organisation (CCO) research says that the interaction between members and objects plays a vital role in constructing ‘communication yielding organising.’ The emergent organisation rests on the negotiations of conversations and texts which carry the ongoing organisational communication. Workplaces in which the workforce composition is shifting from permanent workers to a mixture of permanent and temporary workers gradually realise pertinent changes in their conversations and texts, which as carriers of organisational communication constitutes how the organisation emerges as well.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Using narratives in creativity research: Handling the subjective nature of creative process

Saikat Chakraborty

The Qualitative Report

For most of us, creative processes are those which can produce outcomes that are capable of being judged as creative. The outcome-centric recognition of creativity has heavily downplayed the process-perspective of creativity in organizations. Influenced significantly by individual and social subjectivities, creative processes are difficult to enquire on the basis of positivist approaches presently dominating creativity research. Use of narrative methodology in creativity research is proposed as a strategy for not just handling the subjectivities but also for making meaning from them as well as from participants' emotions. Antenarratives can help to enrich the narrated storyline, and personal narratives of the researcher allows to tie back the subjectivities through co-created meanings. The article aspires to invigorate attention towards the foundations of creativity research that has offered little scope for research paradigms that are beyond the objective-positivist tradition. Consequently, it urges the research community to seek suitable methodologies like the narrative which promises to explore the process-perspective of creativity and enlarge our organizational understanding of creativity.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Automobile dependence and physical inactivity: Insights from the California Household Travel Survey

Saikat Chakraborty and Eun Jin Shin

Journal of Transport and Health

Background

Auto-dependence has been linked to the physical inactivity epidemic across U.S. cities, resulting in unprecedented increases in incidences of obesity, cardiovascular diseases, depression, etc. The search for strategies to pull an overwhelming majority of auto-dependents out of their sedentary lifestyles by encouraging them to use transit, walk and bike continues to challenge planners and policy-makers.

Methods

We use the 2012–13 California Household Travel Survey data for analyzing the auto-dependence and physical inactivity connection. We select a sample of employed individuals with access to car in urban California, and classify them as discretionary transit riders (N=390), active auto-dependents (N=1287), or sedentary auto-dependents (N=8754) based on their self-reported travel mode use and time spent in physical activity over a 24-h period. We investigate factors that are associated with significantly high physical activity among some auto-dependents relative to the sedentary majority. We also revisit the transit-physical activity connection, and explore conditions that make transit use unfeasible for some active auto-dependents.

Results

Discretionary transit use is associated with higher physical activity. However, there is large variation in physical activity within auto-dependents; significantly higher physical activity is associated with factors such as higher income, flexible work schedule, shorter work hours, and mixed land use. Kids, inflexibility of work schedule, low residential density, lack of pedestrian and bicycling friendly street design, and long distance to transit stops prohibit otherwise active auto-dependents from choosing transit. Employment sector influences both physical activity and choice of transit.

Conclusion

To get sedentary auto-dependents out of endemic physical inactivity, our research indicates the need for targeting lower-incomes, incentivizing employers to provide flexible work hours, and to continue dense, mixed-use developments that make active travel feasible. In addition, to get active auto-dependents to use transit, transit managers must focus on retaining immigrant riders and non-Hispanic Asians, and attracting people with children.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Quantifying invariant features of within-group inequality in consumption across groups.

Anindya S. Chakrabarti, Arnab Chatterjee, Tushar Nandi, Asim Ghosh, and Anirban Chakraborti

Journal of Economics interaction and Coordination

We study unit-level expenditure on consumption across multiple countries and multiple years, in order to extract invariant features of consumption distribution. We show that the bulk of it is lognormally distributed, followed by a power law tail at the limit. The distributions coincide with each other under normalization by mean expenditure and log scaling even though the data is sampled across multiple dimension including, e.g. time, social structure and locations. This phenomenon indicates that the dispersions in consumption expenditure across various social and economic groups are significantly similar subject to suitable scaling and normalization. Further, the results provide a measurement of the core distributional features. Other descriptive factors including those of sociological, demographic and political nature, add further layers of variation on the this core distribution. We present a stochastic multiplicative model to quantitatively characterize the invariance and the distributional features.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Impact of religion-based caste system on the dynamics of Indian trade unions: Evidence from two state-owned organizations in North India

Jatin Pandey and Biju Varkkey

Business and Society

Religion and its envisaged structures have both macro- and micro-level implications for business. Of the many stratification schemas prevalent in India, two macro-social stratification schemas are important at the workplace: caste, which has been an age-old, religion-mandated, closed social stratification prevalent in Hinduism that had led to inequality in the society, and trade union, which is a relatively new and optional open workplace stratification that empowers workers and fosters equality. This study tries to decipher whether these two structures influence each other; if yes how and why do they influence each other (the tensions and contradictions that may happen between them), and whether the influence is uniform for all members. We conducted in-depth interviews with 43 trade union members, three trade union leaders of two state-owned organizations in North India. Initially, we found that caste does not have any superficial effect on the relationship between union members. However, a deeper analysis reveals that roots of this social reality reflect in the social and workplace exchanges between union members, and affect their social identity and loyalty. In the discussion we present a model of twin loyalties between union and caste. From the institutional logic perspective, we also delineate the caste and trade union perspective, and show how there is a change in trade union identity because of the influence of caste-based logic. Our findings have implications for industrial democracy, worker representation, and union effectiveness.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Nuclear energy: A nuclear safety

M P Ram Mohan

Yearbook of International Environmental Law, Oxford University Press

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Journal Articles | 2017

Do celebrities have it all? Context collapse and the networked publics

Asha Kaul and Vidhi Chaudhri

Journal of Human Values

With the advent of social media and increase in networked publics, context collapse has emerged as a critical topic in the discussion of imagined audiences and blurring of the private and the public. The meshing of social contexts portends problematic issues as messages inadvertently reach unimagined audiences causing shame and leading to loss of ‘face’. In this article, we specifically study the impact of context collapse on some celebrities ‘who had it all’ yet, lost ‘it some’ to the world of networked public. The article examines celebrities sharing identity information across multiple contexts and explores situations of lost fame when ‘face’ is threatened, usage falters and breaks some of the well-established norms of interactivity. It concludes that lack of prudence in separating social contexts, loss of ‘face’ and social approval can dampen online celebrity presence. It proposes the use of ‘polysemy’ to simultaneously appeal to audiences from different contexts.

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IIMA