Working lives face several interruptions, either due to employers’ decisions, new regulations or individuals’ choices, resulting in breaks, slumps, stagnations or even exits. Several types of job seekers thus arise due to such interruptions, of which one category comprises individuals seeking to re-enter the workforce after a period of voluntary exit. Most South Asian countries face a challenge of low labor force participation of women with the exit of women significantly high in middle and senior levels of an organization. The Indian workforce reports a reduction in the number of women at higher organizational positions. While the percentage of women employees hired at the entry level across industries is 21, it shrinks to 15% at higher positions; of these 28% quit their jobs at the executive levels. One of the primary reasons for women leaving the workforce is child-birth. However, recent years have seen such women seeking to return to full-time work after a voluntary exit. This chapter shall focus on the experiences of women who left their jobs post child-birth and returned to the industry after a prolonged absence. We use the term re-entry women to describe such women and seek to understand their experiences of re-entry. Based on interviews with 15 women in various professions, we present the work and family expectations as perceived by women and try to understand how they navigate these during re-entry. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

To combat the critical stresses of rising urbanization, the government acquires land from private owners using the power of eminent domain. This land assembly causes negative externalities such as increasing social tension and injustice that may impose a long-term threat to stability and sustainable development. Therefore, there is a need to make the land acquisition process more transparent and just. Considering the unique Indian context where informality has a strong presence, we propose an approach based on game theory that models the bargain through a three-stage Nash equilibrium game. Four agents – the government, the private developer, the landowner, and the free rider – are considered. We provide conditional solutions for the generalizable Case and proceed to model different stakeholder behavior patterns through two utility functional forms – linear and exponential. In the linear case, we find that the free rider obtains half of the revenue of the project, whereas the landowner gains between one-fourth and one-half of the revenue. Thus, we highlight the undeniably crucial role free riders play in land acquisition negotiations. However, closed form solutions cannot be obtained for the exponential form, due to which we use simulations to demonstrate a solution procedure. We conclude by stating that the proposed model can be useful in formulating future land policies in a sustainable and inclusive manner, with optimal utility derivations for all concerned stakeholders. Our model can also be extended to other spatial contexts where informality features heavily in the land market, especially in the Global South. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd

We propose a new order of financing investments based on the considerations of control and financial constraints in a market with the presence of business groups. We base our analysis on a sample of acquisitions, one of the largest forms of investments, made by India's publicly listed firms from 1997 through 2016. We test the relative propensity of group-affiliated firms, as well as that of standalone (non-affiliated) firms, to finance their investments with stock on the one hand, and either cash or debt on the other. We find that group-affiliated bidders have the greatest propensity to finance their investments with stock when taking over firms affiliated with the same business group (within-group acquisitions), followed by standalone firms making acquisitions (standalone acquisitions). Finally, group-affiliated bidders acquiring either standalone firms or firms not affiliated with their group (outside-group acquisitions) have the lowest propensity to finance their investments with stock. The evidence of higher stock-financing of within-group acquisitions is robust to alternative explanations of tunneling and propping up in business groups. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.

Identity theft has impaired e-commerce. To combat the crime, many identity theft countermeasures (ITC) have been proposed. As investments in ITC are substantial and the benefits of such investments are intangible, companies are often hesitant to adopt such measures. This was the motivation for this study of the impact of 526 ITC adoption announcements on short- and long-term market value. The event study shows that such announcements result in positive market return of about U.S. $583 million around the date of announcement. Calendar-time portfolio analysis (CPA) is used for the long-term impact analysis and shows that the adoption of ITC generates positive and significant average monthly return up to 1.5% with control of market risk factors in two years. Subsampling analysis and interaction analysis show that U.S. listing, early ITC adoption, and two- factor authentication may moderate the market value of ITC adopters differently. A number of robustness checks (e.g., Heckman model, cross-sectional regression on Tobin's Q, firm-specific risk factor analysis, subsampling analysis by ICT development, and analysis of security statements in annual reports) are performed. The research provides quantitative evidence of financial gain resulting from adoption of ITC and aspires to raise ITC awareness among industrial practitioners. © 2019 University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.

We study bidding by anchor investors in a two-stage initial public offering (IPO) process and document a negative, causal relation between allocation to anchor investors and underpricing. We find that anchor investors are likely to invest in hard-to-place offerings characterized by valuation uncertainty. We also document a positive relation between allocation to reputed anchor investors and returns up to lock-up expiration. Our evidence provides support for information revelation and targeting specific investors’ theories of book building. Anchor-backed IPOs earn superior returns mainly due to monitoring. Who bids in an IPO seems to matter just as particular types of bids do. © 2018 Financial Management Association International

Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS2) can provide insights to enhance the environmental sustainability and lower environmental impact. However, its successful realisation for preventing the production of waste, while increasing efficiencies in the uses of energy and human capital remains a highly convoluted problem. This research article aims to address this issue by presenting an innovative uncertainty-based framework that can be used to assist in achieving increased sustainability within the context of IPS2. The developed framework explains the drivers for decision-making and cost to enable sustainability improvements in transforming to industrial services. This is based on academic literature, and multiple case studies of seven industrial companies with over 30 h of semi-structured interviews. The validation of the framework through two case studies demonstrates that uncertainty management can enable resource efficiency and offer sustainable transformation to service provision. © 2018 The Authors

In this paper, we explore a popular flexible work arrangement (FWA), home-based telework, in the Indian IT industry. We show how IT managers used the dominant meanings of telework to portray telework as an employee benefit that outweighed the attendant cost—intensified work. While using their discretion to grant telework, the managers drew on this portrayal to orchestrate a negotiated exchange with their subordinates. Consequently, the employees consented to accomplish the intensified work at home in exchange of telework despite their opposition to the intensified work in the office. Thus, whereas the extant studies consider work intensification as an unanticipated outcome of using FWAs, we show how firms may use FWAs strategically to get office-based intensified work accomplished at home. While the dominant argument is that employees reciprocate the opportunity to telework with intensified work, we show a discursively orchestrated negotiation that favors management. A corrective policy measure is to frame telework as an employee right. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

Although the behavioral theory of the firm posits that performance shortfalls trigger problemistic search, the actual performance consequences of problemistic search remain an open question. We argue that certain cognitive, affective, and behavioral mechanisms triggered by performance shortfalls make managers more aware, attentive, motivated, and disciplined, resulting in adaptation, learning, and enhanced firm value. Furthermore, differences in the extent to which managers feel pressured to adapt, and have the ability to adapt, can shape managerial awareness, motivation, and capability, and hence firm value. Our empirical analysis, using data for a sample of US manufacturing firms (1994–2013), confirms that problemistic search enhances firm value, and this association is strengthened when firms face greater pressure to adapt or have a greater ability to adapt. © 2019 Elsevier Inc.

Estimating the effect of ethnic capital on human capital investment decisions is complicated by the endogeneity of immigrants’ location choice, unobserved local correlates and the reflection problem. We exploit the institutional setting of a rare immigrant settlement policy in Germany, that generates quasi-random assignment across regions, and identify the causal impact of heterogeneous ethnic capital on educational outcomes of children. Correcting for endogenous location choice and correlated unobservables, we find that children of low-educated parents benefit significantly from the presence of high-educated parental peers of the same ethnicity. High educated parental peers from other ethnicities do not influence children's learning achievements. Our estimates are unlikely to be confounded by the reflection problem since we study the effects of parental peers’ human capital which is pre-determined with respect to children's outcomes. Our findings further suggest an increase in parental aspirations as a possible mechanism driving the heterogeneous ethnic capital effects, implying that profiling peers or ethnic role models could be important for migrant integration policies. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.

There is little consensus globally on the relationship between board diversity and firm performance. Using the resource dependence and agency views, this paper examines how business group affiliation influences the relationship between board diversity and firm performance as a contextual/confounding factor. Based on data for listed firms in India, we find that board demographic diversity is positively associated with the firm performance (Tobin's Q) of standalone firms, but this association is negative for group-affiliated firms. This negative effect of group affiliation is confirmed in a test based on a novel measure of firm performance using the stock market reaction to the announcement of mergers and acquisitions. For both measures of performance, we show that business group affiliation impairs the positive firm value effects of board demographic diversity. These findings imply that the relationship between board diversity and firm performance requires re-examination in the many countries where group affiliation is common. Our results also provide evidence of a new cost of group affiliation and show in a fresh context that cross-country studies should account for international variations in ownership and institutional structures. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd

Natural disasters like cyclones are a common phenomenon in India, especially in coastal regions. During disaster, victims of a village/ locality normally take shelters in groups in some nearby safe areas (for example, Multi Purpose Cyclone Shelters). Despite of having access to physical infrastructure with basic facilities, disaster victims at cyclone shelters often find it difficult to communicate their exact situational information (like, resource needs and damage information) directly to the local/central authorities. Due to lack of coordination among relief workers and the remote central office, conflicting demands are often generated, causing mismanagement and delay in relief operation. This paper proposes innovative usage of social technology to build resilient community, a mandatory prerequisite to enhance disaster preparedness and coping up mechanisms among collectives inhabited in vulnerable areas. This paper presents an architecture of a Knowledge Informatics Hubs using social technologies at local multipurpose cyclone shelters (MPCS) in coastal areas that will empower the local community members to interact and collaborate with each other, establish communication with various supporting agencies during disaster, establish links with experts and participate in local governance. The aim of creating such a hub would be to create digitally empowered resilient communities who are not only prepared to prevent or minimize the risk of damage to life, property, and the environment due to disaster, but also have the ability to quickly reinstate their normal life and livelihood after a crisis, reopen businesses, and restore other essential services needed for the full economic recovery. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.

A randomization-based theory of causal inference from strip-plot designs is developed. For any treatment contrast, we propose an unbiased estimator, work out its sampling variance, and obtain a conservative variance estimator which is shown to enjoy a minimaxity property. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.

Granger causality tests find that the official interest rate (OIR) changes made by the central banks of Australia, China, India, South Korea, Philippines, and Taiwan cause OIR changes at other central banks, but no central bank dominates in its impact. Event study tests show that OIR announcements impact short-term market interest rates more than long-term market interest rates in their own countries. Our study shows that announcements by India and China have the largest impact on the other four countries. Markets anticipate OIR changes consistent with the objective of transparency by monetary authorities to reduce economy uncertainty for market participants. © 2019

In this paper we demonstrate that options contract coordinates single supplier - multiple buyer supply chain network and can eliminate channel conflict stemming from simultaneous price and inventory competition. We show that a pure strategy unique Nash equilibrium exists for buyers’ game and the supplier is able to coordinate the entire supply chain. Our analysis further indicates that options contract provides the supplier with better flexibility in terms of profit allocation compared to buyback contract. We identify a key limitation of this contract: it can coordinate a supply chain only with a limited number of buyers. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd

This article studies the competitive dynamics between an incumbent and a late entrant in a market governed by network effects. Classifying markets based on decision criterion used by majority of consumers in a market, an analytical model for the likelihood of incumbent displacement in these markets is developed and corroborated using simulations. Using product quality offered and product price charged by the entrant as managerial levers, the impact of managerial decision-making on the expected market share of the entrant is discussed. Efficacy of seeding and delayed entry by the entrant in an attempt to perfect its product is also examined. © The Author(s) 2019.

This study inquires whether cultural proximity may explain how media handle terrorism in a global village era where cultural proximity may have given way to cosmopolitanism in news-making. Findings indicate that although loss of life is not culture-bound, cultural proximity persists, as comes through in the sheer contrast in the amount of coverage devoted to Paris versus Beirut. This distinction ought to be qualified, for even with Paris, the self-interest of the nation-state was prioritized, meaning that national security and welfare come first, followed by those of culturally proximate locales. Sensational violence was emphasized for both Lebanese and French victims. © The Author(s) 2019.

The textile supply chain has attracted worldwide attention because of its high volatility in apparel and cotton production due to coordination issue and yield uncertainty. In this context, existing analytical works related to coordination are restricted to a dyadic apparel retailer–manufacturer setting under demand uncertainty for the conventional manufacturer-led scenario. Several issues, such as the holistic depiction of the textile supply chain, impact of cotton production uncertainty, coordination mechanism for the emerging retailer-led scenario, and profitability issue of cotton firms, have not been paid enough attention. We propose an analytical model for a textile supply chain by adopting a five-level structure that comprises an apparel retailer, apparel manufacturer, textile firm, fiber firm, and cotton firm under simultaneous demand and supply uncertainty using a wholesale price contract. The wholesale price contract fails to coordinate the supply chain. Next, we show how the buyback contract and option contract coordinate this supply chain under manufacturer-led and retailer-led scenarios, respectively. Additionally, we discuss the improvement of cotton firm's profitability using a risk-sharing mechanism between the cotton firm and the fiber firm for the high loss-making scenarios. Also, we demonstrate how the risk-averse attitude of both the apparel retailers and the cotton firms can lead to the unsold cotton inventory problem. As extensions, first, we devise joint pricing and order quantity decision of apparel. Finally, we consider production uncertainties for all middle-level members in our proposed model and devise a buyback bidirectional sales rebate penalty contract for coordination. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.

The deployment of the fourth generation (4G) of mobile services is gaining traction across the developed and the developing world. A host of Carrier Frequencies (CFs) are used for provisioning 4G services utilizing the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks. The cellular propagation characteristics of these CFs differ across the radio spectrum, leading to variations in their cellular coverage capabilities. Also, the capacity of such 4G-LTE networks depends on the service usage patterns and the volume of subscribers. This study explores the temporal (years 2016-2026) dynamics arising out of such coverage and capacity requirements of 4G-LTE network infrastructure, across CFs in sub 1 GHz and 1-3 GHz cohorts, by taking the case of the 22 Telecom Circles (TCs) in India. We evaluate, with the help of Okumura-Hata and Cost 231 radio propagation models, the 4G-LTE infrastructure required for ensuring coverage across these TCs and CFs. We also forecast the 4G-LTE subscriber adoption in these TCs and predict their data volume demands over the years. Finally, we calibrate the 4G-LTE coverage requirements, with the capacity requirements, across the TCs. We find that all the TCs in India would soon become 'capacity constrained' thereby leading to additional spectrum bandwidth requirements across the TCs. © 2019 Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers (IEIE).

Data on managerial compensation, past performance ratings, and human capital variables (specifically education and work experience) from a manufacturing unit in India were explored in order to explain the variation in total and budgeted variable compensation. The results obtained provide support for the influence of human capital as well as performance variables on compensation. Human capital variable (specifically education) probably impacted compensation structure through market value in a way that could be dubbed elitist. There was some reflection of tournament view also (more differential for higher designation) on compensation. © 2019

Social media platforms, owing to its great wealth of information, facilitates one’s opportunities to explore hidden patterns or unknown correlations. It also finds its credibility in understanding people’s expressions from what they are discussing on online platforms. As one showcase, in this paper, we summarize the dataset of Twitter messages related to recent demonetization of all Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes in India and explore insights from Twitter’s data. Our proposed system automatically extracts the popular latent topics in conversations regarding demonetization discussed in Twitter via the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)-based topic model and also identifies the correlated topics across different categories. Additionally, it also discovers people’s opinions expressed through their tweets related to the event under consideration via the emotion analyzer. The system also employs an intuitive and informative visualization to show the uncovered insight. Furthermore, we use an evaluation measure, Normalized Mutual Information (NMI), to select the best LDA models. The obtained LDA results show that the tool can be effectively used to extract discussion topics and summarize them for further manual analysis. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019.