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Small farmers in developing countries have very little means of managing the weather‐risk to their agricultural produce. Weather derivatives could provide a solution, but the demand for such instruments and the willingness to invest in them needs to be researched. The purpose of this paper is to assess weather‐risk hedging by farmers, focusing on the willingness to pay in Rajasthan, India.

The paper presents results of a contingent valuation study done on the findings of a survey carried out in six villages in the state of Rajasthan. The survey was done on over 500 farmers after explaining the concept of weather derivatives and how they would work to help them hedge their weather‐related yield risk. The survey included questions on factors, which could have a bearing on the farmers' willingness to pay, and a bidding game where responses were solicited to premiums in a hypothetical market. Probit and logit models are used to determine probabilities of “Yes” responses to various bids and the mean willingness‐to‐pay.

The paper brings out a model, which uses nine independent variables affecting the probability of a farmer saying “Yes” to a price quoted to him for a weather derivative. Using the results from the probit and logit models, the farmers' mean willingness‐to‐pay is determined to be around 8.8 per cent of the maximum possible payout of a weather derivative contract.

With weather derivatives being accepted as a means of risk management for agriculture in developing countries, the willingness‐to‐pay figures determined in this paper would provide an insight to the structuring and pricing of weather derivatives, especially in developing countries.

This paper aims to investigate the association of COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths with mental health, unemployment and financial markets-related search terms for the USA, the UK, India and worldwide using Google Trends.

The authors use Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients to assess the relationship between relative search volumes (RSVs) and mental health, unemployment and financial markets-related search terms, with the total confirmed COVID-19 cases as well as deaths in the USA, UK, India and worldwide. The sample period starts from the day 100 cases were reported for the first time, which is 7 March 2020, 13 March 2020, 23 March 2020 and 28 January 2020 for the US, the UK, India and worldwide, respectively, and ends on 25 June 2020.

The results indicate a significant increase in anxiety, depression and stress leading to sleeping disorders or insomnia, further deteriorating mental health. The RSVs of employment are negatively significant, implying that people are hesitant to search for new jobs due to being susceptible to exposure, imposed lockdown and social distancing measures and changing employment patterns. The RSVs for financial terms exhibit the varying associations of COVID-19 cases and deaths with the stock market, loans, rent, etc.

This study has implications for the policymakers, health experts and the government. The state governments must provide proper medical facilities and holistic care to the affected population. It may be noted that the findings of this study only lead us to conclude about the relationship between COVID-19 cases and deaths and Google Trends searches, and do not as such indicate the effect on actual behaviour.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to investigate the relationship between the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the USA, UK and India and at the global level and RSVs for mental health-related, job-related and financial keywords.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the stock market performance of companies featured in the survey “Best Companies to Work For” as a proxy for corporate culture.

The authors employed the portfolio formation and event study methods from finance to examine the linkage between corporate culture and future stocks returns. The lists of India’s best place to work for by Great Place to Work® Institute and Business Today (BT), India’s leading business magazine, form the primary surrogate for a great corporate culture. The authors compared the stock market performance of the culture portfolio vis-à-vis market index, in addition to using Carhart’s (1997) four-factor model.

A portfolio of Indian firms that featured in the “Best Companies to Work For” by Great Place to Work© Institute and BT magazine provides a higher return than the market index Sensex both on an ordinary return and on a risk-adjusted basis. The four-factor αs of the value-weighted culture portfolios are significant, implying that these portfolios have provided abnormal returns during the sample period. Moreover, the findings suggest a positive drift in the abnormal returns after inclusion in the “Best Companies to Work For” list.

The results are largely in conformity with the prediction of the theory that states that corporate culture is an economic asset for a firm that increases its value.

From an investor’s point of view, the study indicates that investment in “Best Companies to Work For” is a better alternative than passive index investing.

This study fills the empirical void in the relationship between corporate culture and stock market performance in the Indian context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of value-at-risk (VaR) in the cross-section of stock returns in the Indian stock market during the period 1999-2014.

The paper follows the methodology of Bali and Cakici (2004) to investigate the relationship between VaR and stock returns and employs Fama and French’s (1993) and Fama and Macbeth’s (1973) methods to find out the predictive power of VaR in time-series and cross-section settings. Further, it follows Fama and French (2008) to estimate separate cross-section regressions for small, medium and big stocks to verify the pervasiveness of the anomaly.

This study finds positive risk premium associated with VaR in the Indian stock market during 2001-2008, the period of short selling constraint for institutional investors. This premium is confined to small stocks and low institutional holdings. The positive premium can be attributed to short selling constraints.

The risk-return tradeoff can be utilized by investors and fund managers. As it is confined to small stocks, transaction costs may affect the profitability of the investment strategy.

The study contributes to the scanty empirical literature on the role of VaR in the cross-section of expected stock returns. Moreover, this is the first study that explores the relationship between VaR and stock returns in the asset pricing context for the Indian stock market.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the presence of herding behavior of Indian investors using daily sample data drawn from the Standard and Poor's (S&P) Bombay Stock Exchange-500 Index over the period 2007–2018.

The study employs the model proposed by Chang et al. (2000), taking stock return dispersion as a measure to capture herding. The empirical results demonstrate the absence of herding behavior in all market states, that is, normal, up and down market conditions for the overall period.

Contrastingly, the study found negative herding behavior, which underlines that individuals are taking the decision away from the market consensus. The subperiod analysis corroborates the negative herding behavior. The results remain invariant across large, mid and small-capitalization firms except in one year, that is, 2009 for small firms. While using liquidity and sentiment as variables to examine herding, the study finds some evidence of herding behavior for high market liquidity state and sentiment. The findings of negative herding shed new light on herding behavior in the Indian stock market.

This pattern of behavior may indicate irrationality of investor behavior and the presence of noise traders who mistrust market-wide information. Behavioral factors such as overconfidence may explain this pattern of behavior.

This paper investigates the style timing and liquidity style timing vis-à-vis the market, size, value and momentum factors of the actively managed Indian equity mutual funds.

We examine the style timing of the funds using the augmented Carhart four-factor model by incorporating timing measures (Treynor and Mazuy; Henriksson and Merton). Based on this, the study explores the four-factor liquidity and volatility style timing exhibited by fund managers. The sample is from April 2000 to March 2018 and spans the volatile 2008 subprime economic crises. The sample comprised 182 actively managed equity funds from various sizes and was considered to be a well-diversified sample.

The results of our study provide strong evidence of market liquidity timing in India. No other style timing skills are observed in our analysis. Our results also imply that the fund managers might misidentify size timing as market timing if integrated liquidity timing measures are not employed, leading to false conclusions.

The findings of our study imply that the fund managers might misidentify size timing as market timing if integrated liquidity timing measures are not employed, leading to false conclusions.

This study, to our knowledge, is the first attempt to investigate the portfolio-based style timing in the Indian context.

This study aims to empirically compare the performance of Islamic indices vis-à-vis to their conventional counterparts in India.

The performance of the Islamic and selected conventional indices is evaluated using various risk-adjusted performance measures such as Sharpe ratio, Treynor ratio, M-square (M²) ratio, information ratio, capital asset pricing model (CAPM), Fama-French three-factor model and Carhart four-factor model in India context. The period of study is from December 2006 to 2018.

The risk-adjusted performance measures based on the Sharpe ratio, Treynor ratio, information ratio, the M² ratio show that the return of Islamic indices provides slightly superior performance. However, performance investigated using CAPM, Fama-French and Carhart benchmarks produce a statistically insignificant differences in return of the Islamic and conventional benchmarks.

The Sharīʿah-compliant indices can provide a viable, ethical and alternative investment avenue for faith-based investors as it will not make them worse off in comparison to the conventional benchmarks. This also offers opportunity to conventional investors for portfolio diversification. The promotion of faith-based investment can serve as a tool for financial inclusion to attract a huge segment of Indian population in the formal financial system. The findings of the study suffer from the limitation of small sample size and empirical methods used.

This study contributes to the literature on the comparative performance of Islamic and conventional indices in general and emerging markets, in particular, using most recent data and covering a relatively long span of time. To the best of the knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study examining the performance of Islamic indices, using multiple Islamic indices and various risk-adjusted measures in the Indian context.

ß-thalassemia is a hereditary disorder due to mutation in the ß-globin gene on chromosome 11. Out of 200 known ß-globin gene chain mutations recognized, it is better to identify the most common mutation in specific regions and ethnicity for cost-effective molecular diagnosis of this disorder. Therefore, this study aims to practice multiplex-amplification refractory mutation system (ARMS) PCR on patients with thalassemia in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) to investigate the most common mutations in the ß-globin chain gene.

Twenty-two individuals (patients, their parents and non-affected siblings) with signed consent were studied from six consanguineous families of ß-thalassemia. Blood samples were collected for DNA isolation. For the detection of mutations in the ß-globin gene, ARMS-PCR was used. The amplicon was visualized through 2% Agarose Gel.

The most common mutations among different ethnic groups in the study area residents were Fr 8-9 (+G) and IVS 1-5 (G> C). The prominent enhancing factors for ß-thalassemia are inter-family marriages and lack of awareness.

Multiplex ARMS_PCR is the most valuable technique for assessing multiple mutations in a single reaction tube.

Due to extensively found ethnic and regional variations and a high rate of consanguinity, the Pashtun population has a great risk of mutations in their genome. Therefore, ARMS-PCR is a cost-effective mutational diagnostic strategy that can help to control disease burden.

Limited studies using ARMS-PCR for mutational analysis in the ß-globin gene are conducted. This study is unique as it targeted consanguineous families of KP Pakistan.

This paper aims to examine the presence of momentum profit in the Indian stock market and seeks to explore the sources of momentum profit employing both risk based and behavioral models. R2, idiosyncratic volatility, and delay measures are employed in order to test behavioral models.

The paper follows Jegadeesh and Timan's methodology in constructing momentum portfolios.

The study finds strong presence of momentum profits in India during 1995‐2006. The risk based models such as CAPM and Fama‐French fail to account for the phenomenon. Idiosyncratic risk exhibits a positive relation with momentum, lending support to behavioural factors as source of momentum phenomenon.

In forming portfolios, selecting the stocks which have been winners in the last three and six months can help investors and fund mangers earn substantial profit.

The study employs behavioral variables to explain the momentum phenomenon. In the Indian context it is an unexplored area.