Human capital, inequality, endogenous growth and educational subsidy: A theoretical analysis

This paper develops an endogenous growth model with dualism in human capital accumulation of two types of individuals. The government imposes a proportional income tax on rich individuals and uses the tax revenue to finance the educational subsidy given to poor individuals. We find out the properties of the optimal tax financed educational subsidy policy in the semi-stationary equilibrium of the model using the technique of Stackelberg differential game.     

Adoption of Ubiquitous Customer Relationship Management (uCRM) in Enterprise: Leadership Support and Technological Competence as Moderators

Abstract

Ubiquitous Customer Relationship Management (uCRM) signifies the realization of special characteristics, including proactiveness, context awareness, and mobility. This uCRM helps to enhance promptness and timeliness of the traditional system, thereby creating an environment associated with a state of being everywhere in no time and covering any device and any network. uCRM provides high personalization of service. The uCRM system has opened a new area of satisfaction for customers. Context awareness computing, a uCRM characteristic, is presumed to have enhanced benefits for a firm adopting uCRM in India. In this context, this study has taken a holistic attempt to analyze how technological competence and leadership support can enhance the business performance of a firm adopting uCRM. With input from literature studies, a hypothesis and a conceptual model have been formulated. Statistically, those have been validated with survey work considering 165 usable respondents from 22 different firms situated in three metropolitan cities in India. Results show that the effect of technological competence and leadership support positively help a uCRM-dependent firm towards achieving better business benefits. The study ends with a comprehensive conclusion.     

The future of fintech

This article describes the growing field of financial technology (fintech) and the different financial paradigms and technologies that support it. Fintech is primarily a disintermediation force where disruptive technologies are the drivers. This framework discusses 10 primary areas in fintech comprising a taxonomy, which categorizes research in the field and also proposes a pedagogical structure. Pitfalls of fintech are also analyzed. Overall, the great strides made in computing technology, mathematics, statistics, psychology, econometrics, linguistics, cryptography, big data, and computer interfaces have combined to create an explosion of fintechs.     

Is public investment complementary to private investment in Indian agriculture? Evidence from NARDL approach

The issue of complementarity between public farm investment and private farm investment in Indian agriculture is an unsettled empirical question in the literature, which has not been studied adequately. Few studies analyzing the trends of both types of investments have produced contradictory results. Thus, this study attempts to bridge that gap, by examining the hypothesis of crowding‐in/crowding‐out effect of public sector investment on private investment. Time series data for a period of 45 years from 1971 to 2015 has been used. Adopting a ‘nonlinear auto‐regressive distributive lag’ (NARDL) model the study confirms a strong crowding‐in effect of public investment on private investment in short run, but relatively a weak complementarity between the two over long‐run. Moreover, the public canal intensity as a major component of public investment has been observed to have much stronger effect on private investment than the public investment itself. It is also found that private investment is constrained by its own lagged values, institutional credit and terms of trade during both short‐run and long‐run. The policy suggestion of this study calls for an immediate arrest of declining trend of public investment.     

Inspiring employees' ecological behaviors: The roles of corporate environmental strategy,biospheric values,and eco-centric leadership

The consequences of environmental degradation have steered organizations to promote pro-ecological behaviors among their employees, and achieving this effectively is paramount for business and environmental sustainability. Applying a multilevel integrated approach, this study investigates the impact of corporate environmental strategy, biospheric values, and eco-centric leadership on employees' ecological behaviors. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from 289 employees from a cross section of industries in Bangladesh. The findings reveal the significant influences of environmental strategy and biospheric values on employees' ecological behaviors as well as the moderating role of eco-centric leadership. The study also provides some significant insights for formulating environmental strategy and inspiring employees' ecological behaviors in organizational contexts. Theoretical and managerial implications as well as future research directions have also been provided.     

Are short‐term effects of pollution important for growth and optimal fiscal policy?

We study optimal fiscal policy in a stock‐flow model of the environment within an endogenous growth framework, where some pollutants have a lasting impact on environmental quality which is restored through abatement expenditure, while others dissipate and hence, have a short‐term effect on the environment. All pollutants, however, affect the productivity of a public good negatively. Given that short‐term pollution, although it dissipates, is irreversible in this sense, a government cannot ignore its negative effects since this type of pollution lowers the productivity of all inputs. We find that a larger negative effect of short‐term pollutants as well as a higher congestion effect of private capital leads to corrective fiscal policies with higher optimal income tax and abatement expenditure rates, which have favorable growth consequences. Interestingly, we find that the rate of short‐term pollution does not affect optimal fiscal policy while that of the long‐term pollution does.     

Unionized Labour Market,Unemployment Allowances,Productive Public Expenditure And Endogenous Growth

An endogenous growth model with unionised labour market is developed to analyse the interaction between the tax financed productive public expenditure policy and the unemployment benefit policy. We consider both ‘Efficient Bargaining’ model and ‘Right to Manage’ model; and analyse properties of balanced growth rate maximising income tax policy as well as effects of unionisation. This growth rate maximising income tax rate exceeds the competitive output share of the public input in the presence of an unemployment benefit scheme. The growth effect of unionisation in the ‘Efficient Bargaining’ model and in the ‘Right to Manage’ model are different.     

The impact of credit constraints on exporting firms: Evidence from the provision and subsequent removal of subsidised credit

We study the causal impact of credit constraints on exporters using a natural experiment provided by two policy changes in India, first in 1998 which made small‐scale firms eligible for subsidised direct credit, and a subsequent reversal in policy in 2000 wherein some of these firms lost their eligibility. Using firms that were not affected by these policy changes as our control group in each case, we find that credit expansion increased the growth rate of bank borrowing and had a positive effect on exports. The subsequent policy reversal in 2000 had no impact on the growth rate of bank borrowing or on exports.     

Corporate governance and firm performance relationship: Implications for risk‐adjusted return behavior

We examine the impact of corporate governance on firm performance and stock return behavior using panel data for Indian listed firms for 2006 to 2015. Our results suggest that corporate governance improves firm performance. However, corporate governance information fails to provide excess risk‐adjusted returns to investors, as governance information is well assimilated in prevailing stock prices. In addition to extending the scant literature focused on emerging markets, our findings will prove useful to investors, fund managers, and rating agencies in making investment decisions and regulators in assessing the impact of governance norms.     

Determinants of corporate cash holdings: Evidence from spin-offs

We study the factors that influence the cash allocation decision around a spin-off, using variables suggested by the trade-off theory, and controlling for the possible endogeneity of leverage and cash ratios. Spin-offs provide an opportunity to examine the determinants of cash allocation at the margin at the time of creation of a new entity. Our results indicate that managers allocate higher cash ratios to smaller firms, and firms with high research and development expense ratio, low net working capital ratio, and low leverage. Thus, higher cash ratios are correlated with difficulty of raising external capital and reduced availability of cash from internal sources. In addition, managers also base the cash allocation on observable immediate growth opportunities instead of on long-term possible growth. An analysis of excess cash ratios, defined as the difference between the actual and predicted cash ratios, indicate that firms are, on average, allocated less cash than suggested by trade-off models, and this deviation in allocated cash from predicted levels is explained only by concurrent profitability of the firms (a pecking order theory implication).