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This study examines individual ambiguity attitudes alone and in groups by leveraging the descriptive model of anchoring and adjustment on decision-making under ambiguity. The study extends Ellsberg's probability ambiguity to outcome ambiguity and examines decisions made under both ambiguities, at different likelihood levels and under the domain of gains and losses.

The methodology selected for this study is a two-stage within-subject lab experiment, with participants from different Indian universities. Each participant made 12 lottery decisions at the individual level and at individuals in the group level.

The results show that ambiguity attitudes are not universal in nature. Ambiguity seeking as a dominant choice was observed at both the individual level and at individual in the group level. However, the magnitude of ambiguity seeking or ambiguity aversion contingent upon the domain of gains and losses differed widely across the individual level and at individuals in the group level.

The study enables to contribute toward giving a robust descriptive explanation for individual behavior in real-world applications of finance. It aims to provide direction for theoretical normative models to accommodate heterogeneity of ambiguity attitudes.

The study is novel as it examines a two-dimensional approach by representing ambiguity in probability and in outcomes. It also analyzes whether decisions under ambiguity vary when individuals make decisions alone and when they make it in groups.

Many studies have shown that from a theoretical and empirical point of view, downside risk-based measures of risk are better than the traditional ones. Despite academic appeal and practical implications, downside risk has not been thoroughly examined in markets outside developed country markets. Using downside beta as a measure of downside risk, this study examines the relationship between downside beta and stock returns in Indian equity market, an emerging market with unique investor, asset and market characteristics.

This is an empirical study done by using ranked portfolio return analysis and regression analysis methodologies.

The study results show that downside risk, as measured by downside beta, is distinctly priced in the Indian equity market. There is a direct positive relationship between downside beta and contemporaneous realized returns, indicating a premium for downside risk. Downside risk carries a higher weightage than upside potential in the aggregate return of the stock portfolios. Downside beta is a better measure of systematic risk than conventional market beta and downside coskewness.

The empirical results support the adoption of downside beta in practice and provide a case for replacing traditional beta with downside beta in asset pricing applications, trading and investment strategies, and capital allocation decision-making.

This is one of the first in-depth studies examining downside beta in Indian equity markets using a broad sample of individual stock returns covering a wide time range of 22 years. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first one to compare downside beta and downside coskewness using individual stock data from the Indian equity market.

The case will enable students to understand and ponder on how an organization goes about identifying and launching social impact products, how social impact products should be promoted, what the opportunities and challenges in executing a social impact strategy of developing a new product line by a leading industry player are, what is the type of social investment that will generate both social and financial returns and how a sustainable social impact strategy should be aligned with the corporate strategy of the firm.

Listed in 1991 on the National Stock Exchange in India, Nilkamal Limited is the largest manufacturer of moulded plastic furniture in the world. In line with their tradition, Nilkamal has now introduced a new range of products, under “social impact products” category, to cater to some of the pressing needs of the society. For this purpose, they have entered into an agreement with a US-based organization, Wello, to manufacture and market their iconic product, the Water Wheel. The euphoria surrounding the new social impact product, Water Wheel, has been immense but its commercial viability is yet to materialize. The case provokes the students to analyse the decision of venturing into social impact products and the challenges associated with it. The case grapples with the issues faced by a business firm that looks to incorporate social impact products as part of regular commercial operations. The key question to be addressed is “How far can social impact products be a good strategy to bring corporate sustainability and what should be the approach in this case?”

Study level: MBA students’ applicability: corporate responsibility and corporate sustainability, social impact strategy

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CSS 11: Strategy

Socially responsible and green investment options are gaining notable attention from multiple stakeholders, including individual investors and the government, across both developing and developed markets. The purpose of this study is to examine whether the three recently launched socially responsible indices of India, an emerging market, follow the martingale process. This study also explores the impact of market-wide uncertainty on the market efficiency of these indices.

Using a set of robust parametric and nonparametric tests, including the spectral analysis, the periodogram and the Fisher’s G test, the authors comment upon the market efficiency of Carbonex, Greenex and the environmental, social and governance indices, both in general and during periods of high uncertainty marked by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The results of this study confirm the presence of market inefficiency in socially responsible investments (SRI), both in general and during the COVID-19 crisis in the Indian context.

The results of this study have implications for investors as well as policymakers. Investors, speculators and arbitrageurs may devise profitable trading strategies by using these results. Asset managers and fund houses may use the benefits of reduced volatility of SRI to balance their portfolios and improve asset allocation; regulators and policymakers to strengthen the framework as market inefficiencies reduce investor confidence and hinder capital formation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the market efficiency of multiple SRIs, which were previously unexplored Indian markets, and also the first to comment upon the behavior of SRIs during market-wide uncertainty.

This study aims to empirically examine environment, social, and governance (ESG) as an effective strategy to reduce major impediments for a corporation in the form of costs of capital (COC) and systematic risk, especially for emerging markets such as India.

A sample of 114 Indian firms from eight prominent industries based on Thomson Reuters classification (TRBC) are used in the study. A panel regression with industry-fixed effects is carried out to account for industry heterogeneity. For robustness, the authors also carry out a matched sample analysis.

The authors observe a negative and significant relationship between ESG performance with COC and systematic risk, respectively. For the pillar-wise analysis, the authors observe that only governance performance is negatively and significantly related to COC whereas the environmental and social performances are negative and insignificant. For ESG pillar level analysis for beta, the authors observe that all pillars are negative and significant, thus making a case for how firms can fine-tune their ESG strategies according to each pillar.

As the ESG concept is still in a very nascent stage, data availability is a definite challenge in India.

As ESG is increasingly becoming relevant for multiple stakeholders, this study aims to provide evidence that can potentially guide the regulators, practitioners, and academicians to address the contemporary needs of these stakeholders, while also doing good for the firm in the traditional sense.

The transition to a sustainable economy is a challenge for emerging economies, especially for a country like India where stakeholders are not only varied but also huge in number. With this study's contribution towards an incremental understanding of ESG, Indian regulators and policymakers can bring forward mandates as to ESG compliances that are rewarding for the firms and give them enough impetus towards complying with ESG norms.

The extant literature on ESG majorly discusses the relationship between ESG performance and financial performance. This study addresses the lacuna of the relationship of ESG with COC and beta in the Indian context.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of Indian investor sentiments on contemporaneous stock returns of Bombay Stock Exchange, National Stock Exchange and various sectoral indices in India by developing a sentiment index.

The study uses principal component analysis to develop a sentiment index as a proxy for Indian stock market sentiments over a time frame from April 1996 to January 2017. It uses an exploratory approach to identify relevant proxies in building a sentiment index using indirect market measures and macro variables of Indian and US markets.

The study finds that there is a significant positive correlation between the sentiment index and stock index returns. Sectors which are more dependent on institutional fund flows show a significant impact of the change in sentiments on their respective sectoral indices.

The study has used data at a monthly frequency. Analysing higher frequency data can explain short-term temporal dynamics between sentiments and returns better. Further studies can be done to explore whether sentiments can be used to predict stock returns.

The results imply that one can develop profitable trading strategies by investing in sectors like metals and capital goods, which are more susceptible to generate positive returns when the sentiment index is high.

The study supplements the existing literature on the impact of investor sentiments on contemporaneous stock returns in the context of a developing market. It identifies relevant proxies of investor sentiments for the Indian stock market.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of total and each individual component of environmental, social and governance score (ESG) on financial performance (FP) of healthcare companies.

Data for 468 health-care firms for the business year 2020 is sourced from Thomson Reuters to obtain ESG data. Correlation and multivariate regression analysis are done to investigate the relation between ESG activities and firm performance. The analysis has been done on overall data and subsample data to examine the relation across developing vs developed markets.

The results of the study suggest that relation between ESG score and FP cannot be generalized. The results show that performing ESG activities positively impact firm performance of healthcare companies in developed economies; however, this relationship would be negative or insignificant in the case of developing economies.

The results of this study have implications for both practitioners and policymakers. The authors suggest the specific setups in which the relationship between ESG activities and firm performance will be negative or insignificant. These results are beneficial to policymakers who seek to increase the active participation of firms in ESG activities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore the relationship of ESG score on FP through the lens of country-level development variables for health-care sector companies.

The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss the literature focusing on defining and measuring sentiments so as to understand their role in stock market behavior.

Critical review of the literature by analyzing myriad scholarly articles. The study is based on an analysis of 81 scholarly articles to critically analyze the approach toward defining and measuring market sentiments. The articles have been examined to identify and critique different classification of sentiment measures. A discussion is built to scrutinize the sentiment measures under the purview of theoretical underpinnings of the investor sentiment theory as well.

With more than five decades of research, the sentiment construct in finance literature is still ill-defined. Myriad empirical proxies of sentiment measures have led to conflicting results. The sentiment construct defined in financial theories needs to be revisited from the lens of sentiments defined in psychology.

The study is limited to analyzing the role of individual and institutional sentiments in equity markets. There is a need to explore sentiments with respect to different investment styles and strategies along with the type of investors.

Developing a suitable sentiment proxy can result in devising profitable trading strategies for investors. Understanding factors driving investor sentiments will help regulators to become more proactive and frame better policies.

This paper has leveraged psychology literature to highlight the limitations in development of sentiment construct in finance literature. By identifying stylized facts from reviewing the empirical literature, it highlights areas for future research.

As globalization becomes ever more prominent, the role of media and advertising is increasing. Ideally for large multinationals that have the resources to take advantage of globalization there exists a larger “market” to which products can be sold. To create and sustain their market, these multinationals companies use aggressive advertising strategies. Television is a aggressive advertising media for these companies. In India television advertising has been expanding throughout the 1990s. Close on the heels of multinationals, domestic companies are also using television as a media to reach the Indian masses. As a result, the number of television commercials is increasing. With this the frequency and time of advertising pods, in a program, are also increasing. This competition between the program content and advertising pods is known as “clutter”. This advertising clutter and has led to companies questioning the efficiency of the medium of communication, in terms of reducing the competitive rivalry and creating a brand impression. This paper aims at understanding this relationship between advertising clutter and multiple activities a viewer might be involved in i.e. polychronic use of time: as proposed by Kaufman and Lane (1994). The study concludes that Indian youth exhibit mental nomadship rather than channel or physical nomadship, at current levels of advertising. Furthermore, channel nomadship has a significant relationship with the person who has control over the remote and the time for which the television is being watched. Physical nomadship has a significant relationship with age, gender and education level. Finally, mental nomadship was related to gender and education level. The study also has important implications for managers.

The study explores extant knowledge on the nature of the relationship between internal and external corporate governance mechanisms, particularly board characteristics and audit quality, respectively, while also investigating how the relationship varies across geographies.

The extant knowledge is synthesized using a meta-analysis, which is conducted using a sample of 56 empirical studies from publications of varying grades. The studies span over 25 years (1996–2021) and cover 147 empirical samples (343,787 firm-year observations) across more than 20 countries. The dependent variable is audit fees, and the independent variable captures 12 different measures of board characteristics.

Overall, the results reveal a positive association between board characteristics and audit fees, indicating complementarity between governance mechanisms. Effect size analysis shows board characteristics, like size and independence, are positively associated with audit fees. However, heterogeneity is noted for some characteristics, and further analysis by geography (developed vs emerging countries) explains the heterogeneity.

This study helps multiple stakeholders like firms, shareholders, boards, regulators and policymakers in designing and strengthening governance frameworks.

Both governance and auditing literature benefit from identifying specific board characteristics that drive audit quality consistently across different institutional settings and samples. Heterogeneity analysis helps improve the understanding of contradictions documented in prior literature.

This meta-analysis is the first to explore the interplay between internal and external corporate governance mechanisms, with a focus on board characteristics and audit quality. The study provides valuable insights on how different governance mechanisms influence each other while highlighting, for the first time, how the interaction between governance mechanisms varies by a country's level of development.