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3721 items in total found

Working Papers | 2024

Liquidated Damages in India: Concepts, Enforceability, and Drafting Considerations

M P Ram Mohan, Gaurav Ray, Promode Murugavelu, & Jeeri Sanjana Reddy

Damages in contract law play a crucial role in compensating parties for losses resulting from breaches of contractual obligations. Liquidated damages clauses promote commercial certainty and party autonomy. Section 74 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872 codifies the law on liquidated damages. Over the years, courts have employed several evaluative criteria and interpretative tools when deciding upon the validity, scope and essential aspects of liquidated damages clauses. This paper analyses the principles governing liquidated damages and attempts to use this analysis to provide a guide in drafting a valid and legally enforceable liquidated damages clause.

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Working Papers | 2024

Washed Away: Industrial Capital, Labor, and Floods

Anish Sugathan, Arpit Shah, Deepak Malghan

This study quantifies the dynamic impacts of floods on industrial capital and labor in India using a novel dataset combining geocoded flood events with firm facility-level data from 2000 to 2021. Employing a stacked difference-in-differences approach with carefully matched controls, we uncover persistent negative effects of floods on firms’ assets and employment, with striking heterogeneity across sectors and regions. In the post-flood period, we estimate declines from mean values in total assets of 46.1% (16.68 billion INR ≈ 225 million USD), employment of 49.0% (8.20 thousand workers), and the wage bill of 74.5% (5.52 billion INR ≈ 74 million USD). The sectoral impacts are highly varied: the information technology and communication, manufacturing, and utilities sectors experience significant declines in assets, while the financial services sector exhibits growth. Mapping the spatial distribution of flood events and industrial facilities reveals pronounced regional heterogeneity in flood exposure and economic impacts. Adding nuance to the empirical investigation of the “creative destruction” hypothesis, we find limited evidence of systematic capital reallocation toward better-performing sectors, suggesting instead that floods generate sector-specific impacts with varying recovery patterns. These findings challenge assumptions of rapid post-disaster equilibration and have important implications for policymakers and firm managers in developing sector-specific strategies to mitigate the adverse impacts of floods in an increasingly climate-uncertain world.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Spokesperson effectiveness in B2B advertising: Spokesperson characteristics and posture using eye-tracking

Tanusree Dutta, Subhadip Roy, Soumya Sarkar, Sudipa Nag

This study aims to investigate the nuances of celebrity spokesperson effectiveness in business-to-business (B2B) advertising. Specifically, the study addresses the question of endorser effectiveness in the presence of product complexity (high vs low) and how this effect is moderated by endorser gender. In addition, the study also explores whether the way an endorser is placed in the advertisement (product-facing vs audience-facing) would have differential effects on the buyer.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Consumer perspectives on food traceability—A systematic literature review and future research agenda

Anam Chaudhary, Rajat Sharma, Vidya Vemireddy

Food traceability is a critical approach that ensures the safety and quality of food. It has garnered significant attention, particularly in the aftermath of multiple food safety incidents reported in various countries. While there is extant literature available on consumer perspectives on food traceability, the findings are not consistent across studies. This systematic literature review aims to provide a comprehensive understanding by integrating findings from past studies. It includes 61 articles sourced from two databases, namely Scopus and Web of Science. This review outlines various stages of a consumer's decision for food traceability, starting from exposure, awareness, understanding, liking and disliking, attitudes and preferences, purchase intentions and willingness to pay, to the final purchase. It also identifies the determinants of consumer responses to food traceability, categorising them as factors internal to the consumers, determinants due to the perception of external factors and contextual factors. Moreover, it identifies gaps in the existing research and proposes research questions to expand the knowledge in this area.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Adoption of agronomic practices and their impact on crop yield and income: An analysis for black gram and green gram in India

Poornima Varma, Julius Manda

Black gram and green gram are important pulse crops in India, but their production has faced fluctuations and stagnancy in yields over the last few decades. The Government of India has implemented several measures to enhance crop yield, including recommending and promoting the adoption of crop-specific agronomic practices. However, there is limited empirical evidence on the determinants of the adoption of these practices and their impact on yield and income. In this context, this study analyses the determinants of the adoption of climate and plant management practices among black gram and green gram farmers and their impact on yield, crop revenue and net income across four major crop-producing Indian states using a multinomial endogenous treatment effects model. Our analysis shows that information, contact with government extension services and access to off-farm activities are crucial in adopting climate and plant management practices. The results strengthen the view that the adoption of knowledge-intensive practices happens via formal information sources and plot-level demonstrations. In addition, the results indicate that farmers who experience frequent crop loss exhibit an aversion towards adopting climate and plant management practices. While adopting these practices had a positive impact on crop yield and crop revenue, the impact on net income was observed only in the case of climate management.

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Journal Articles | 2024

What explains rice exports? An analysis of major rice-exporting countries

Poornima Varma

This study examines the drivers of rice trade. The analysis uses the standard comparative advantage model, the Heckscher–Ohlin–Vanek (HOV) framework, supplemented with a gravity-type equation. Using the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) estimation for data from 2002 to 2020, the analysis broadly confirms HOV model predictions. Results indicate that arable land, along with GDP, distance, precipitation and crop season temperature, significantly influences rice trade dynamics. The results showed that the precipitation play a key role in influencing the rice trade rather than the blue water availability. However, agricultural water stress discouraged exports and encouraged imports.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Problem of plenty? Understanding the Impact of choice and information overload on Airbnb bookings

V Athi Karthick, Adrija Majumdar, Indranil Bose

Online sharing platforms offer countless choices and detailed product descriptions to consumers. In this study, we demonstrate the effect of choice and information overload on booking decisions using large-scale field data from Airbnb and observe an inverse U-shaped association. Furthermore, our results show that providing quality assurance of the product exacerbates the choice and information overload relationship. As a post-hoc analysis, we perform topic modeling to gain better insights into how product information influences booking decisions. Specifically, the post-hoc analyses show that the number of topics in the description has a positive association with the number of bookings. Furthermore, topic count moderates the information overload effect by intensifying the influence of product description on the number of bookings. Our findings have important implications for online sharing platforms, service providers, and travelers as they shed light on the detrimental effects of excessive variety and information on booking decisions.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Trend and determinants of tobacco use among Indian males over a 22 year period (1998-2021) using nationally representative data

Shibaji Gupta, Piyasa Mal, Dhiman Bhadra, S Rajaa, Sonu Goel

Tobacco consumption is associated with an increased risk of morbidity and mortality. India is one of the largest consumers of tobacco worldwide. We assessed the trend of tobacco use among Indian males over a period of 20 years using data obtained from four rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS).

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Journal Articles | 2024

Spatial variation and risk factors of the dual burden of childhood stunting and underweight in India: A copula geoadditive modeling approach

Dhiman Bhadra

India has one of the highest burdens of childhood undernutrition in the world. The two principal dimensions of childhood undernutrition, namely stunting and underweight can be significantly associated in a particular population, a fact that is rarely explored in the extant literature. In this study, we apply a copula geoadditive modelling framework on nationally representative data of 104,021 children obtained from the National Family Health Survey 5 to assess the spatial distribution and critical drivers of the dual burden of childhood stunting and underweight in India while accounting for this correlation. Prevalence of stunting, underweight and their co-occurrence among under 5 children were 35.37%, 28.63% and 19.45% respectively with significant positive association between the two (Pearsonian Chi square = 19346, P-value = 0). Some of the factors which were significantly associated with stunting and underweight were child gender (Adjusted Odds Ratio (AOR) = 1.13 (1.12) for stunting (underweight)), birthweight (AOR = 1.46 (1.64) for stunting (underweight)), type of delivery (AOR = 1.12 (1.19) for stunting (underweight)), prenatal checkup (AOR = 0.94 (0.96) for stunting (underweight)) and maternal short-stature (AOR = 2.19 (1.85) for stunting (underweight)). There was significant spatial heterogeneity in the dual burden of stunting and underweight with highest prevalence being observed in eastern and western states while northern and southern states having relatively lower prevalence. Overall, the results are indicative of the inadequacy of a “one-size-fits-all” strategy and underscore the necessity of an interventional framework that addresses the nutritional deficiency of the most susceptible regions and population subgroups of the country.

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Journal Articles | 2024

What Happens when parents find violence acceptable? A case of violent humorous commercials targeted at children

Akshaya Vijayalakshmi, Russell N. Laczniak

We examine the influence of violent–humorous commercials on children and whether parental mediation can temper children’s aggressive responses to violent–humorous ads. We find that (a) violent–humorous ads lead to higher levels of aggressive affect in children, and (b) violent ads lead to higher levels of aggressive cognition and aggressive affect in children (Study 1). We also find that active parental mediation does not have the intended effect of reducing children’s aggressive responses after they view violent–humorous commercials (Study 1). This effect, which is contradictory to general expectations, occurs because parents are less likely to perceive the violent–humorous (vs. solely violent) ad as violent (Studies 2A and 2B) and, consequently, they show less interest in critically mediating the ad (Study 3). Through this study, for the first time, we show (a) the impact of violent–humorous ads on children (vs. adults); (b) the impact of violent–humorous ads on aggression (beyond attitudes toward ads); and (c) the effect of parents’ violent–humorous ad beliefs on parental mediation. The findings of our study suggest that the humor in a violent–humorous ad appears to trivialize the violence in the ad, with not-so-trivial consequences.

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