An Assessment of Gender Discrimination in Household Expenditure on Education in India

Gender discrimination in household expenditure on education has led to unsatisfactory progress in educational attainment for women in many countries across the world. It has been observed that households across different states in rural and urban India prefer to incur more expenditure on education for male members than for females. Kingdon (2005) [Where has all the bias gone? Detecting gender bias in the intra-household allocation of educational expenditure, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 53(2), 409–452] has observed significant gender bias in household educational expenditure in a number of Indian states utilizing the household survey data of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi. Other researchers, such as Chaudhuri & Roy (2006) [Do parents spread educational expenditure evenly across the two genders? Evidence from two North Indian states, Economic and Political Weekly, 41, pp. 5276–5282] and Lancaster et al. (2008) [Household expenditure patterns and gender bias: evidence from selected Indian states, Oxford Development Studies, 36(2), 133–157], have also confirmed the presence of significant gender bias in the expenses incurred on education by households in India. However, few of these studies are based on the analysis of sufficiently large, contemporary datasets, and hence they are unable to provide a picture of gender discrimination at the disaggregated level, i.e. at the state level. Since there is wide variation in social, cultural, anthropometrical, economic and many other factors among Indian states, it is important to analyse gender disparity in India at the level of the state. Here, utilizing individual-level data on educational expenditure from the 64th round of the National Sample Survey, an attempt is made to assess the current scenario in gender inequality in household educational expenditure in India at both the national and state level. It is observed that significant gender disparity exists in intra-household educational expenses and that this discrimination is not confined to the “backward” or developing states in India.     

MIXED OWNERSHIP,MANAGERIAL INCENTIVES AND BANK COMPETITION

We consider deposit competition between two banks, where prior to competition one bank is subjected to a nationalization decision and the other bank chooses managerial incentives. The government who maximizes a modified form of social welfare (with greater weight on profit than depositor surplus) chooses only partial nationalization, which still hurts the rival private bank. But by offering deposit‐linked managerial incentives the private bank recovers its lost profit and induces even less nationalization, leaving social welfare unchanged. However, under interest rate competition for differentiated deposits the private bank offers profit‐linked managerial incentives while the other bank may be completely nationalized.     

A covariate‐adjusted adaptive design for two‐stage clinical trials with survival data

A randomized two‐stage adaptive design is proposed and studied for allocation of patients to treatments and comparison in a phase III clinical trial with survival time as treatment responses. We consider the possibility of several covariates in the design and analysis. Several exact and limiting properties of the design and the follow‐up inference are studied, both numerically and theoretically. The applicability of the proposed methodology is illustrated by using some real data.     

The market response to corporate scandals involving CEOs

This article examines corporate scandals of both a financial and nonfinancial nature between 1993 and 2011 which is expressly linked to a firm’s CEO. Findings suggest that in the short run, investors react adversely to such events and that recalcitrant CEOs end up costing their shareholders dearly. Such scandals are more likely to occur among large firms, firms with insiders on the board and where the value of options granted to a firm’s managers is substantial. However, firms with more cash flows are less likely to be mired in such scandals, and their stock returns are less likely to be affected. There is an increase in stock price volatility of affected firms in the days following the announcement of the scandal. A point of respite for investors is the damage being confined to the short run. The stock price performance of the firms affected by the scandals matches the performance of control firms in the long run post-announcement. However, the operating performance of the sample firms is better than their matched counterparts in the years after the scandal. We contribute to the extant literature by considering corporate scandal events that are the doings of a firm’s CEO and not necessarily financially motivated.     

Small asymmetric fractional factorial plans for main effects and specified two-factor interactions

Fractional factorial plans represented by orthogonal arrays of strength two are known to be optimal in a very strong sense under a model that includes the mean and all the main effects, when all interactions are assumed to be absent. When a fractional factorial plan given by an orthogonal array of strength two is not saturated, one might think of entertaining some two-factor interactions also in the model. In such a situation, it is of interest to examine which of the two-factor interactions can be estimated via a plan represented by an orthogonal array, as also to study the overall efficiency of the plan when some interactions are in the model alongwith the mean and all main effects. In this paper, an attempt has been made to examine these issues by considering some practically useful plans for asymmetric (mixed level) factorials with small number of runs.