Choice of Diversification Strategies in an Emerging Market: Evidence from Indian Manufacturing Industries

The study seeks to measure the strategic choice of industries over different dynamic phases in the Indian economic environment. The total sample of 536 companies has been divided into 14 industries as per Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes. The paper also categorizes companies as per the cyclical changes in the economy, that is, growth, cyclical, and defensive industries. Evidence suggests that choice of diversification is industry specific and concurrently affected by the environmental conditions prevailing in the emerging economy. Food and beverages, plastic/rubber, and electrical equipment industries follow higher categories of diversification than other industries.     

Can Mobile Money Help Firms Mitigate the Problem of Access to Finance in Eastern sub-Saharan Africa?

ABSTRACT

Mobile money is a mobile-phone-based financial tool that can transfer money safely and quickly across a wide geographical area. Mobile money has transformed the way businesses in Eastern sub-Saharan Africa operate. Nowadays, banks team up with mobile-money-service providers and pay interest on deposits and grant loans based on financial transactions in mobile-money accounts. In this paper, these recent developments are investigated in order to determine whether the adoption of mobile money by firms can actually help them mitigate the vexing problem of access to finance. To answer this question, the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys Program data set for the year 2013 is used, thus making the study applicable to the present time. The results obtained, after controlling for a large number of firm-level characteristics and using a newly introduced measure to identify access-to-finance status of the firms, indicate that firms which use mobile money are more likely to obtain loans or lines of credit. Further analysis shows that the firms that use mobile money are more productive than other firms in the region.     

Efficiency tests in the Spanish futures markets

The Spanish futures markets, the MEFF RENTA FIJA, and the MEFF RENTA VARIABLE, are among the fast-growing futures markets in the world. These markets are known for their cutting-edge technological innovations related to trading, providing information, clearing, and settlement. The growing importance of these markets for both foreign and domestic investors motivated the examination of their efficiency. Test results from serial correlations, unit root tests, and variance ratio tests overwhelmingly show that the random walk hypothesis cannot be rejected, indicating that the MEFF markets are efficient. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 59–77, 1999     

Antecedents of cognitive age: A replication and extension

Cognitive age has been an important construct in studies of older consumers. The present study builds upon previous research by providing theory‐based antecedents of cognitive age. The results suggest that differences in cognitive age do not merely reflect differences in chronological age, and that a person's cognitive age is influenced by his or her experiences of life events that serve as markers of transitions into social roles people are expected to enact at different stages in life. In addition, the experiences of health‐related events, such as chronic conditions, make people aware of their aging, affecting their cognitive age. The influence of cognitive age on consumer‐behavior variables is also examined, and directions for future research are suggested. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Contagion Effects from the 1994 Mexican Peso Crisis: Evidence from Chilean Stocks

The contagion, or informational spillover, effects of the 1994 peso crisis from the Mexican market to the Chilean market, and to the Chilean American Depository Receipts (ADRs) trading in the U.S., are examined. Significant excess returns are observed for Chilean stocks for the event dates of the Mexican Peso crisis, providing evidence of contagion effects. Significant excess returns on these Chilean ADRs are also observed for each of the five event dates associated with the Peso crisis, suggesting that the contagion effects spilled over to the ADRs. A multiple regression model shows that the spillover contagion effects were very efficiently transmitted from the Mexican market to the Chilean market to the Chilean ADRs. Multifactor regressions show that the most significant influence on the pricing of Chilean ADRs is the raw Chilean Index, rather than the Chilean Index expressed in U.S. dollars.     

AN APPROPRIATE SYSTEM FOR DEFLATION OF SECTORAL INCOME IN A DEVELOPING ECONOMY ILLUSTRATED BY THE INDUSTRIAL SECTOR OF THE INDIAN ECONOMY FROM 1951 to 1965*

The technique of national income accounting is a part of what Hicks has termed “The Fixprice Method”. Deflation is an attempt to approximate a real economy to a fixprice economy. It is shown that if the propositions of macro-dynamics are to hold, this deflation cannot be done in accordance with the price structure prevailing at any particular historical time, but must use that given by the capital theory of value, viz., when returns to labour are equal to zero. For a labour-abundant developing economy this will correspond to prices based on opportunity cost principles. As an illustration, sectoral incomes on this basis have been calculated for the industrial sector of the Indian economy for the years 1951 to 1965.     

National Papers of Interest to Economic Educators

The author argues that while advances in technology may have made long-range and long-term planning less critical, they have not made long-run decisionmaking obsolete.