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626 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2017

Replicating small farms, prosperous farmers in India: Lessons for policy and practice

Sukhpal Singh

Journal of Agribusiness Marketing

Small farm and small farmer viability has been a constant policy concern in India given its smallholder-dominated agriculture. Though there are different definitions of small farm in the literature, depending on local context, the term “smallholder” is a relative one in that it refers to the limited resource endowments of such farmers relative to those of other farmers in the sector in each local context. The Indian small farmers are in a state of agrarian distress, and the farmers’ quest for earning enough from a small farm continues. It is in this context of academic and policy discourse that this article makes evidence-based policy and practical recommendations for replicating the Small Farmer, Prosperous Farmer (SFPF) models of agricultural development in India based on empirical case studies of 35 small (who were just 2 hectares or smaller farm operators) and prosperous farmers (earning at least one lakh (0.1 million)Indian rupees per acre per year) across three states of India— Punjab, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Major objectives of the study carried out in 2012 were as follows: document profiles of SFPFs in terms of their resources, costs, and profits; provide evidence of success (in terms of net income and prosperity) given small holdings; identify major factors in prosperity/success—personal, institutional, and social; and understand the role of policy and business environment, if any; and infer on possibilities of replicability of SFPF success given the other contextual factors in other regions. The study identifies sources of success and policy relevance of such factors for making inclusive agricultural development possible.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Sentiment analysis of financial news articles using performance indicators

Srikumar Krishnamoorthy

Knowledge and Information Systems

Mining financial text documents and understanding the sentiments of individual investors, institutions and markets is an important and challenging problem in the literature. Current approaches to mine sentiments from financial texts largely rely on domain-specific dictionaries. However, dictionary-based methods often fail to accurately predict the polarity of financial texts. This paper aims to improve the state-of-the-art and introduces a novel sentiment analysis approach that employs the concept of financial and non-financial performance indicators. It presents an association rule mining-based hierarchical sentiment classifier model to predict the polarity of financial texts as positive, neutral or negative. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated on a benchmark financial dataset. The model is also compared against other state-of-the-art dictionary and machine learning-based approaches and the results are found to be quite promising. The novel use of performance indicators for financial sentiment analysis offers interesting and useful insights.

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Journal Articles | 2017

HMiner: Efficiently mining high utility itemsets

Srikumar Krishnamoorthy

Expert Systems with Applications

High utility itemset mining problem uses the notion of utilities to discover interesting and actionable patterns. Several data structures and heuristic methods have been proposed in the literature to efficiently mine high utility itemsets. This paper advances the state-of-the-art and presents HMiner, a high utility itemset mining method. HMiner utilizes a few novel ideas and presents a compact utility list and virtual hyperlink data structure for storing itemset information. It also makes use of several pruning strategies for efficiently mining high utility itemsets. The proposed ideas were evaluated on a set of benchmark sparse and dense datasets. The execution time improvements ranged from a modest thirty percent to three orders of magnitude across several benchmark datasets. The memory consumption requirements also showed up to an order of magnitude improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. In general, HMiner was found to work well in the dense regions of both sparse and dense benchmark datasets.

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Journal Articles | 2017

The Impact of self-deception and professional skepticism on perceptions of ethicality

Sobhesh Kumar Agarwalla, Naman Desai, and Arindam Tripathy

Advances in Accounting

This paper examines the impact of two contradictory psychological traits, self-deception (SD) and professional skepticism (PS), on individuals' assessment of ethicality of various earnings management choices. Whereas, SD allows individuals to reduce cognitive dissonance arising from self-serving unethical behavior, PS would force individuals to question such self-serving behavior and, as a result, could make them less likely to act unethically. Our results indicate that SD, PS, and participant type significantly affected the participants' ethicality ratings. Managers exhibiting high (low) SD and low (high) PS view the earnings management techniques that were generally considered to be unethical, as relatively more (less) ethical. However, the SD and PS scores of accountants are not significantly related to their ethicality ratings. This result could be driven by the fact that accountants tend to have greater exposure to information that emphasizes ethics (professional standards and education) and hence psychological traits have a lesser effect on their ethicality ratings.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Size, value, and momentum in Indian Equities

Sobhesh Kumar Agarwalla, Joshy Jacob, and Jayanth Varma

Vikalpa

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Journal Articles | 2017

Delhi–Mumbai industrial corridor: Economic and environmental consequences

Seth Schindler and Shruti Sharma

Economic and Political Weekly: A Journal of Current Economic and Political Affairs

The Delhi–Mumbai Industrial Corridor represents a re-centralisation of urban planning in India with the primary objective to foster export-oriented growth. An analysis of census and manufacturing data shows that the DMIC is likely to increase regional inequality. Moreover, rather than fostering regional integration, this state-led corridor development remains a series of discontinuous and fragmented territories.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Heterogeneity of imported intermediate inputs and labour: Evidence from India’s input tariff liberalization

Shruti Sharma

Applied Economics

This article explores whether the nature of imports matters when examining the effects of trade on plant-level labour outcomes. Previous literature that examines this question mainly considers imported intermediate inputs as a homogenous group and is unable to reach a consensus on the effects of input tariff liberalization on employment and wages of skilled and unskilled workers. Exploiting detailed product-level information available on intermediate inputs from plant-level data for the Indian manufacturing sector, I distinguish between plants that import mainly for quality considerations as opposed to plants that seek imports as cheaper alternatives to domestic inputs. I find that strong complementarities exist between skilled workers and imported inputs for plants importing high-quality inputs. For plants importing intermediate inputs mainly as a cost-cutting strategy, input tariff liberalization leads to an increase in employment of both skilled and unskilled workers, but a decline in skill composition. This can best be explained as a strategy that achieves economies of scale. On average, as input tariffs liberalize, importing plants employ more workers and pay higher wages than non-importing plants.

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Journal Articles | 2017

From well-heeled to tip-toed, shoe-shine to shoe-lace: Monopolistic Competition and Product Differentiation in Men's Footwear

Vishal Kumar and Satish Y. Deodhar

International Review of Business and Economics

For many decades, the only branded footwear Indians knew was Bata. After years of economic liberalization; however, one finds many local, national, and international firms jostling for customer attention by producing various types of branded footwear. In fact, India has now emerged as the second largest producer of footwear in the world. The Indian footwear market can be described today as a stylized case of a monopolistically competitive market. In this study, we focus our attention on men’s formal shoes which are differentiated by variations in many attributes such as heel, toes, colour, surface, laces, buckles and brands. Invoking hedonic price analysis and bid and offer curves of the customers and firms respectively, shoe prices are viewed as the sum total of the valuation of each of these attributes. The relative valuation is estimated by regressing market prices of shoes on its binary variable attributes. Analysis shows that shoes made of leather, shiny surface, buckles, laces, and brands carry a premium; and, differentiation based on colour, pointed toes, high heels, and texture is not important. In a highly competitive market, such data driven studies can provide pointers to firms in altering existing shoe models and successfully launching newer ones.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Groups and teams: A review of bad apple behavior

Saravana Jaikumar and Avina Mendonca

Team Performance Management: An International Journal

Purpose

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to broaden the understanding of the three negative member (bad apple) behaviors – withholding of effort, interpersonal deviance and negative affect – put forth by Felps et al. (2006).

Design/methodology/approach

An integrative review of extant literature was conducted to understand the impact of the negative member behaviors on other team members. Potential interventions to control this bad apple behavior are identified with supporting evidence from recent empirical studies.

Findings

A review of empirical findings in the literature indicate that perceived coworker loafing may lead to counterproductive work behavior toward coworkers and interpersonal deviance may affect the task cohesion of the group. However, the presence of affectively negative individuals is empirically proven to improve the group performance, especially when the group task is related to creativity or information processing (decision-making and idea generation).

Originality/value

Despite the empirical attention paid to “bad apple” behaviors, the implications for managing negative member behaviors are unclear and scattered. In this paper, building on the framework proposed by Felps et al. (2006), the authors focus on three behaviors and provide a concise review of literature and interventions to control or exploit these behaviors.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Exploring themes, trends, and frameworks: A meta-analysis of online business education research

Shailendra Palvia, Anil Kumar, Poonam Kumar, and Sanjay Verma

Americas Conference on Information Systems

The growth of online education has become a global phenomenon driven by emergence of new technologies, widespread adoption of the Internet, and intensifying demand for a skilled workforce for a digital economy. Online education is no longer a trend; it is slowly but surely becoming mainstream by 2025. This paper explores all efforts, accomplishments, issues, challenges, conclusions, and recommendations on this theme through meta-analysis of over 100 published papers since 2000. Through thorough content analysis, we provide useful recommendations for researchers and practitioners working in academia, industry, or government. We also propose a holistic model of interactions between diverse entities and stakeholders in the online tertiary business discipline education industry. This model will certainly be applicable with minor changes to other disciplines and other levels of education—primary and secondary. This model can be tested in piecemeal fashion by researchers using appropriate research methodology.

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IIMA