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3899 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2017

Replicating small farms, prosperous farmers in India: Lessons for policy and practice

Sukhpal Singh

Journal of Agribusiness Marketing

Small farm and small farmer viability has been a constant policy concern in India given its smallholder-dominated agriculture. Though there are different definitions of small farm in the literature, depending on local context, the term “smallholder” is a relative one in that it refers to the limited resource endowments of such farmers relative to those of other farmers in the sector in each local context. The Indian small farmers are in a state of agrarian distress, and the farmers’ quest for earning enough from a small farm continues. It is in this context of academic and policy discourse that this article makes evidence-based policy and practical recommendations for replicating the Small Farmer, Prosperous Farmer (SFPF) models of agricultural development in India based on empirical case studies of 35 small (who were just 2 hectares or smaller farm operators) and prosperous farmers (earning at least one lakh (0.1 million)Indian rupees per acre per year) across three states of India— Punjab, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Major objectives of the study carried out in 2012 were as follows: document profiles of SFPFs in terms of their resources, costs, and profits; provide evidence of success (in terms of net income and prosperity) given small holdings; identify major factors in prosperity/success—personal, institutional, and social; and understand the role of policy and business environment, if any; and infer on possibilities of replicability of SFPF success given the other contextual factors in other regions. The study identifies sources of success and policy relevance of such factors for making inclusive agricultural development possible.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Child labour and human capital in developing countries - a multi-period stochastic model

Indrajit Thakurta and Errol D'Souza

Economic Modelling

This study investigates the co-determination of child labour and human capital acquisition through a life cycle model. It explores three categories of households with zero, ten and fifteen years' education of household heads who also have differential access to financial markets. Results show that financially excluded, uneducated households prefer assets with negative returns over human capital investments in their offspring, and hence fall into an intergenerational poverty trap. Their educational investments begin only after an income threshold is reached and the same may be funded through transfers or withdrawal of educational subsidies from college educated households without lowering their human capital investments. Educational subsidies and higher access to educational inputs work best for middle educated households who have higher demand for education. For policy analysis, this study quantifies the contributions of income support, financial inclusion, lower uncertainty and subsidised education in reducing the supply of child labour.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Sentiment analysis of financial news articles using performance indicators

Srikumar Krishnamoorthy

Knowledge and Information Systems

Mining financial text documents and understanding the sentiments of individual investors, institutions and markets is an important and challenging problem in the literature. Current approaches to mine sentiments from financial texts largely rely on domain-specific dictionaries. However, dictionary-based methods often fail to accurately predict the polarity of financial texts. This paper aims to improve the state-of-the-art and introduces a novel sentiment analysis approach that employs the concept of financial and non-financial performance indicators. It presents an association rule mining-based hierarchical sentiment classifier model to predict the polarity of financial texts as positive, neutral or negative. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated on a benchmark financial dataset. The model is also compared against other state-of-the-art dictionary and machine learning-based approaches and the results are found to be quite promising. The novel use of performance indicators for financial sentiment analysis offers interesting and useful insights.

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Journal Articles | 2017

11-W: The impact of perceived temperature on responses to Psa Ads

Akshaya Vijayalakshmi, Meng-Hsien (Jenny) Lin, and Melika Kordrostami

Advances in Consumer Research

This working paper finds that the affiliative sensations triggered through priming of warm/cold touch can increase the effectiveness of public service announcement (PSA) by increasing empathy, threat perceptions and donations to the cause. However, this is likely to be true only for high need for touch participants.

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Journal Articles | 2017

HMiner: Efficiently mining high utility itemsets

Srikumar Krishnamoorthy

Expert Systems with Applications

High utility itemset mining problem uses the notion of utilities to discover interesting and actionable patterns. Several data structures and heuristic methods have been proposed in the literature to efficiently mine high utility itemsets. This paper advances the state-of-the-art and presents HMiner, a high utility itemset mining method. HMiner utilizes a few novel ideas and presents a compact utility list and virtual hyperlink data structure for storing itemset information. It also makes use of several pruning strategies for efficiently mining high utility itemsets. The proposed ideas were evaluated on a set of benchmark sparse and dense datasets. The execution time improvements ranged from a modest thirty percent to three orders of magnitude across several benchmark datasets. The memory consumption requirements also showed up to an order of magnitude improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. In general, HMiner was found to work well in the dense regions of both sparse and dense benchmark datasets.

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Journal Articles | 2017

The Impact of self-deception and professional skepticism on perceptions of ethicality

Sobhesh Kumar Agarwalla, Naman Desai, and Arindam Tripathy

Advances in Accounting

This paper examines the impact of two contradictory psychological traits, self-deception (SD) and professional skepticism (PS), on individuals' assessment of ethicality of various earnings management choices. Whereas, SD allows individuals to reduce cognitive dissonance arising from self-serving unethical behavior, PS would force individuals to question such self-serving behavior and, as a result, could make them less likely to act unethically. Our results indicate that SD, PS, and participant type significantly affected the participants' ethicality ratings. Managers exhibiting high (low) SD and low (high) PS view the earnings management techniques that were generally considered to be unethical, as relatively more (less) ethical. However, the SD and PS scores of accountants are not significantly related to their ethicality ratings. This result could be driven by the fact that accountants tend to have greater exposure to information that emphasizes ethics (professional standards and education) and hence psychological traits have a lesser effect on their ethicality ratings.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Energy appliance transformation in commercial buildings in India under alternate policy scenarios

Amit Garg, Jyoti Maheshwari, P.R.Shukla, and Rajan RawalKordrostami

Energy, 140(1), 952-965

The total electricity consumption from commercial sector was about 9% during 2013–14 in India. Load research survey was carried out to study the usage patterns for all types of electric appliances used in commercial establishments at income, appliance and end-use levels in Gujarat state of India – one of the most progressive states. Penetration level of efficient appliances, electricity load curves and Energy Performance Index (EPI) were estimated. The mean EPI was 98 kWh/m2/year (SD = 105.5) for surveyed small commercial establishments (low income) while mean EPI was 181 kWh/m2/year (SD = 68) for surveyed large commercial establishments (Malls). Electricity saving potentials was estimated if electric appliances at these commercial establishments were replaced with efficient appliances. Four alternate scenarios were analyzed using cost of conserved energy (CCE) curves with various efficiency enhancement options – following at least commercial sub-category level median EPIs, following average EU equivalent EPI levels, following average EPI levels of equivalent US commercial establishments, and following the best available technologies (BAT). The average energy savings ranged between 14% and 25% across buildings and scenarios. Energy efficient air-conditioner and LED lights offer the highest energy savings potential among appliances.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Cost-effective architecture of carbon capture and storage (CCS) grid in India

Amit Garg, P.R.Shukla, Shrutika Parihar, Udayan Singh, and Bhushan Kankal

International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control

Various modeling studies analyzing global 2 °C climate stabilization scenarios have projected penetration of CO2 capture and storage (CCS) technologies in India alongside a sizable penetration of renewable energy technologies. The assessments of geological storage potential over India have shown wide variation across regions. This paper examines the locations of large point sources of CO2 emissions in India and matches it with carbon storage locations to minimize the cost of CCS evolving grid. The concept of weighted Euclidean distance and Integrated Environmental Control Model are used to propose suitable pipeline networks for emissions-intensive clusters to optimize the cost of CO2 avoidance. The computational method estimates proximate storage location for each CO2 emitting source taking into account the total storage potential at each location. CCS requirement in India would vary depending on the global climate stabilization target. We examine two targets for India that correspond to 2 °C and well below 2 °C global mitigation regimes. According to our estimates, India could mitigate around 780 Mt CO2 per year below 60 $/t-CO2 (2005 prices) over 30 years, and another 250 Mt CO2 per year for up to 75 $/t-CO2 prices through CCS under these scenarios respectively.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Relevance of clean coal technology for India’s energy security: A policy perspective

Amit Garg, Vineet Tiwari, and Saritha Vishwanathan

IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science

Climate change mitigation regimes are expected to impose constraints on the future use of fossil fuels in order to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In 2015, 41% of total final energy consumption and 64% of power generation in India came from coal. Although almost a sixth of the total coal based thermal power generation is now super critical pulverized coal technology, the average CO2 emissions from the Indian power sector are 0.82 kg-CO2/kWh, mainly driven by coal. India has large domestic coal reserves which give it adequate energy security. There is a need to find options that allow the continued use of coal while considering the need for GHG mitigation. This paper explores options of linking GHG emission mitigation and energy security from 2000 to 2050 using the AIM/Enduse model under Business-as-Usual scenario. Our simulation analysis suggests that advanced clean coal technologies options could provide promising solutions for reducing CO2 emissions by improving energy efficiencies. This paper concludes that integrating climate change security and energy security for India is possible with a large scale deployment of advanced coal combustion technologies in Indian energy systems along with other measures.

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Journal Articles | 2017

The1.5°C target and coal sector transition: at the limits of societal feasibility

Thomas Spencer, Michel Colombier, Oliver Sartor, and Amit Garg

Climate Policy

National and global mitigation scenarios consistent with 1.5°C require an early phase-out of coal in major coal-dependent countries, compared to standard technical and economic lifetimes. This appears particularly apparent in the light of recent massive investments in coal power capacity, the significant pipeline of coal power capacity coming online, as well as upstream supporting infrastructure. This article analyses the existing and planned capital stock in the coal power sector in the light of scenarios consistent with 1.5°C. The article analyses the political economy and labour aspects of this abrupt and significant transition, in the light of domestic equity and development objectives. Firstly, the article examines employment issues and reviews the existing literature and practice with support schemes for regional and sectoral structural adjustment for the reduction of coal sector activity. Secondly, the paper surveys the domestic political economy of coal sector transition in major coal using countries, namely Australia, South Africa, China and India. A final section provides conclusions and policy recommendations.

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IIMA