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Guar Gum (GG) is used in Shale oil exploration. Excessive price increase in the Guar futures market had a spillover impact on Guar spot prices and affected Guar export from India as Shale oil producers started exploring alternate sources. In this paper, the role of excessive speculation in the futures market, and its adverse impact on the guar-based agri-business ecosystem have been empirically explored.

Volatility spillover dynamics between WTI crude oil and Guar futures have been explored using bivariate-Granger Causality, BEKK–GARCH models with Wavelet multi-resolution analysis. The wavelet-based models capture the multi-scale features of mean and volatility spillover to identify the effect of heterogenous investment behavior in the time and frequency domain.

The results provide evidence that excessive speculation in futures markets increases spot market volatility. The results also suggest that the excess presence of short-term investors can destabilize the futures market.

The purpose of the commodity futures market is to support price discovery and risk management. However, speculative practices can destabilize these purposes leading to the failure of the business ecosystem.

The novelty of this paper is twofold. First, it explores the economic linkages between the spot and futures market and tests whether the presence of heterogeneous traders affects the economic linkages. Second, it models the impact of short-term speculative investment on the destabilization of the spot market.

This study introduces influential-female-directors as a board-gender-diversity variable that captures not only the female representation on the board but also their position on the informal-boardroom-hierarchy. Further, this study investigates whether such directors have a significant influence on the dividend-payout-decisions of leading firms in an emerging economy, India, where concentrated ownership is prevalent and explores the moderation effect they exert on dividend–ownership relationship.

This study uses generalized methods of moments (GMM) to tackle the issues put forth by the sample of 450 firm-year observations.

This study finds that influential-female-directors have a significant influence on the dividend-payout-decisions of the firm. Additionally, the presence of female directors in the audit-committee makes the board more vigilant and encourages foreign institutional investors to expect more dividends. Furthermore, domestic institutional investors expect a return on their investments through share price appreciation rather than dividends, and the influence of promoters in dividend-payout-decisions is reduced in the presence of such directors.

This study pioneers the use of influential-female-directors as a board-gender-diversity metric and carries an in-depth analysis of the influence and moderation effect they exert on the dividend-payout-decisions of the board and the dividend expectations of different institutional investors, respectively.

The handicraft sector is unorganized with huge potential for the economic upliftment of the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) craft producers. To ensure the sustainable livelihood of the artisans living in BOP, it is essential to identify the hurdles being faced by them so that they can be worked upon. This paper aims to look at the existing handicraft value chain in an integrated way to identify these hurdles and suggest probable solutions to mitigate them.

A two-stage study involving quantitative and qualitative approaches is used. Empirical observations from 218 artisans were analyzed using the relative to an identified distribution to rank the different variables affecting the functioning of the handicraft value chain. Next, 17 handicraft entrepreneurs were interviewed to identify solutions for the hurdles.

A two-stage study examining the perspectives of artisans and handicraft entrepreneurs identified five significant challenges affecting the handicraft sector and viable solutions to address them. While presenting an operational model, a comprehensive picture of the handicraft business ecosystem was studied, from the procurement of raw materials to the marketing and sale of finished products. This can assist handicraft producers in sustaining their livelihoods and expanding the industry.

Studies on the handicraft value chain at BOP are rare, and none have tried to look at the sector holistically to find solutions and propose an operational framework. The study has captured the voices of the artisans and handicraft entrepreneurs and, through a mixed-method approach, identified the main pain points of the BOP artisans to arrive at a workable solution for better business outcomes.