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2758 items in total found

Working Papers | 1998

Retail Investors and Mutual Funds: A Case for Assured Return

Gupta Ramesh

This paper presents a case for assured return in mutual fund industry. The retail investor is willing to take the market risk but would like to limit their losses due to intermediation risk which arises because of poor institutional accountability and lack of complete faith in the integrity of people managing their funds. This risk which is almost non-existent in the developed countries is very high in India. Assured returns promised in the past must be honoured. Failure of equity markets cannot be an excuse. Fund managers were paid astronomical pay packages for their abilities to plan right debt: equity investment mix and select promising scrips in the portfolios managed by them. Nothing in the offer documents restricted managers' freedom to manage funds and the investors did not interfere in their functioning. Investors were assured of minimum returns in the offer document and that's why probably they invested their precious savings. Now SEBI's role should be limited to see that contractual obligations are fulfilled. If SEBI has to get involved in product design and its pricing, then why was CCI abolished? Market based regulatory system requires that industry evolves its own mechanism to design and market the right product.

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Working Papers | 1998

Paradigm of Sustainable Development Programme in India

Moulik T K and Mathur D P

There has been a great deal of concern all the world over about sustainable development. However, unlike the developed industrialized countries with high standard of living, the sustainability debate in countries like India been consistently fraught with difficult operational issued because of the nature of its internal situations and external linkages. Widespread poverty is the endemic socio-economic problem of India. As a consequence, in the Indian context, the critical operational parameter for defining sustainability is the intra-generational aspect rather inter-generational issues. The paper reviews the conceptional and difinitional issues of 'sustainability' in the Indian context. Further, an attempt is made to examine the strategic implication in implementing sustainable development programmes in some important sectors of activities such as, land, water, energy and forests. While identifying some broad strategic parameters for implementation of the alternative approach towards sustainable development, the paper examines the issues of people's participation, affordable technologies, promotion of all the sectoral activities and the role-play of non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

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Working Papers | 1998

Brand Specific Associations and Consumer Involvement in the Evaluation of Brand Extensions

Bibek Banerjee, Abraham Koshy, and Ganapathy Shobha

Research in the area of brand extensions has focused on the themes of simple affect transfer and category based affect transfer to explain attitude towards the extension. Subsequent research stresses the importance of brand-specific associations in explaining attitude and shows that brand-specific associations moderate the effect of brand affect and category similarity in the evaluation of an extension. This study examines the moderating role of brand-specific associations on brand affect in the evaluation of an extension under conditions of high and low consumer involvement in the extension category. We find that brand affect remains an important variable in explaining attitude towards the extension even in the presence of relevant brand-specific associations in the extension. We find that involvement does not have a direct effect on the attitude towards the extension. However, it moderates the effect of brand specific associations on brand affect in the evaluation of the extension. High involved consumers in the extension category rely on the main effects of brand affect and relevance of association to form their attitude towards the extension, while the low involved consumers perceive the interaction between brand affect and relevance of association in forming their attitude. Thus, contrary to literature on involvement, results show that the process of evaluation of extensions is not different for low involved and high involved consumers. But consumers' method of processing available information is different for varying levels of involvement.

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Working Papers | 1998

Financial Crisis in East Asia: A Macroeonomic Perspective

Dholakia Bakul H

The second half of 1997 witnessed a major financial crisis in several East Asian countries charcterised by massive depreciation of their currencies and crash in the stock markets. The crisis occurred despite fairly impressive economic performance and prudent fiscal policies pursued by East Asian countries and came as a rude shock for many involved in international finance, multilateral institutions, policy-making and academics. An attempt has been made in this paper to provide a macroeconomic perspective on the East Asian crisis by analysing its background, underlying causes, its impact on the affected countries and its implications for Indian economy. The macroeconomic analysis presented in the paper is based on the experience of four countries, viz., Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea, where the severity of the crisis has been quite high.

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Working Papers | 1998

Technology Strategy of Indian Firms Searching for the Role of Complementary Assets and Technology Supply Chains

Pankaj Chandra and Rakesh Basant

As a consequence of economic reforms, the Indian manufacturing sector faces a variety of technology related challenges. It not only has to quickly develop world-class manufacturing capabilities but also gear up to develop new products and process. In this paper we analyse the technology strategies of six Indian firms in different products groups which are trying to build competitive manufacturing & technology capabilities. The linkages between corporate, technology, and manufacturing strategies are explored and the role of complementary assets is studies in order to identify patterns through which these firms are building capabilities of various kinds. Specifically, we evaluate the extent to which firms use supply chains to develop product & process technologies.

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Working Papers | 1998

Need and Challenges of Management Education in Primary Health Care System in India

Dileep Mavalankar

Primary Health Care System in India is very large and covers almost all the parts of the country. It has more than 20,000 PHCs and 140,000 Sub-centres spread in more than 400 districts. This system consumes large amount of resources and is the system which provides the services for primary care including preventive programmes. The system is mainly managed by doctors, some of whom have brief public health training. This paper argues that given the lack of training of doctors in management it is imperative that the doctors who are put in charge of the PHC system receive reasonable skills and training in management so that the resources spent on the PHC system can be utilised well – in an efficient and effective manner. Unfortunately the experience so far has been that there is hardly any systematic effort on adequate scale to meet the training needs of the PHC system for management training. The efforts done so far, even under the internationally supported projects are too less and of poor quality. It is also observed that most management training is very divorced from the day-to-day realities of the working of the PHC system and the kind of challenges they face. Finally the paper argues that substantial efforts will be needed to be put in preparing doctors for the management posts in the PHC system. This will require large investments in training and linking training to practice in the field. The paper also reviews available documents of the newer projects in health to see if there are indications that such a training will happen in future. The paper argues that there is a need for developing a separate health management cadre in India who will be trained in public health and health management to take up leadership role in PHC system in future.

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Working Papers | 1998

Axiometic Characterization of Budget Constrained Pareto Efficient Social Choice for Fair Division Problems

Lahiri Somdeb

In recent times, beginning with the work of Thomson [1988], attention in social choice theory has focused on problems of fair division. The problem is one of dividing a social endowment among a group of agents keeping in mind the issues of equity and efficiency. There is a sizeable literature which has dealt with the problem of axiomatically characterizing the equal income market equilibrium solution. Notable among them are the works of Thomson [1988], Lahiri [1997, forthcoming]. In Thomson and Varian [1985], there is the concept of an income fair allocation. Basically, these are allocations which cost the same for all agents. However, the pirce vector at which the allocation is evaluated, is in the existing literature, endogenously determined by market forces, whence it coincides with equal income market equilibrium allocations. The income fairness concept derives appeal as an independent entity, only if the price at which the allocation is evaluated is specified exogenously. Along with efficiency, it then coincides with what Balasko [1979], calls budget constrained Pareto efficient allocations. To be relevant to the literature on fair division, it should be required that the monetary worth of the allocation at exogenously specified prices, be the same for all agents. In this paper, we axiomatically characterize the social choice correspondence, which picks for each economy, the set of equal income budget constrained Pareto efficient allocations. We are able to characterize this social choice correspondence uniquely, with the help of the following assumptions: Consistency, Equal Budget Property, Pareto efficiency for two agent problems and Local Independence. The most extensive use of Consistency is due to Thomson, as surveyed in Thomson [1990]; the equalbudget property is due to Varian [1976], Pareto efficiency for two agent problems is due to van der Nouweland, Peleg and Tijs [1996], Local Independence is due to Nagahisa [1991]. In a final section, we replace Consistency by Converse Consistency (Thomson [1990]) and Pareto Efficiency for two agent problems by Binary Efficiency (see Lahiri [1997] to obtain yet another axiomatic characterization of the same social choice correspondence.

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Working Papers | 1998

Behaviour of Excess Stock Return Around Earnings Announcement Day: A Test of the Efficiency of Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange

Gupta G S, Jili Ang, and Sanda Ahmadu U

This study is concerned with analyzing stock returns around periods of earnings announcements. Three hundred and sixty-four earnings announcement dates (events) were obtained from the annual earnings announcements of 91 stocks listed on the main board of KLSE for the years 1993 to 1996. For each event market model parameters were estimated and adjusted for thin trading using daily return data for the period six months before the event. The estimated parameters were then used to estimate the residuals for the period 29 days before and 30 days after the announcements. The cumulative average residuals. CAR was found to exhibit a significantly negative trend for more than a month after the announcement. Thus with respect to stocks in the sample the KLSE does not adjust instantaneously to the release of earnings information and hence the KLSE is semi-strong inefficient.

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Working Papers | 1998

Environmental Con trol of Greenhouse at Bhujodi

Pilare Vasant R and Girja Sharan

This write-up contains air temperature data and preliminary analysis of cooling requirement for greenhouse at Bhujodi. Examination of the temperature data showed that night time temperatures remain high enough most of the time. Heating of the greenhouse perhaps will not be required. Day time temperatures on the other hand, remains high enough most of the time to require cooling. Forced ventilation does seem effective, but only for part of day. Evaporation cooling and misting appears necessary. Design of fan-pad system was carried out. It consists of two fans (size 24 inch and 1/3 HP) and cross fluted pad (area 5m2). Water loss is estimated to be about 1000 lit/day in the cooling system, which works out to about 10 lit/m2 of floor are per day.

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Working Papers | 1998

Corporate Takeovers in Malaysia: Discriminant Analysis for Bidder and Target Firms

Gupta G S and Ali Ruhani

Mergers, acquisitions and takeovers are world wide phenomenon and Malaysia is no exception. The first wave of these took off in late 1970s and early 1980s and it is a buzz word unde the current economic trouble. One of the issues to be settled here is which firms act as the bidders and which ones as the targets. The discriminant analysis provides a useful tool for explaining this classification. The paper looks into 144 non-financial firms in Malaysia for period 1980-1993, which includes bidders, targets, control bidders and control targets. A set of five economic/financial variables has been identified to discriminate between the firm's groupings using publicly available time seried data. The empirical findings suggest that the (a) five predictive variables account for about 90% of the firms' groupings, (b) financial leverage is the most powerful discriminatory variable followed by profit, risk, size, and growth, in that order, (c) bidder firms have higher profit and growth, and lower leverage, risk and size, than the target firms, and accordingly provide some support that, (d) the takeover was motivated by the bidder firms' desire for reaping the fruits of economies of scale in order to maintain the tempo of high profit and high growth and/or for displacement of inefficient managers of target firms. These results are corroborated by the logistic regression model.

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