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887 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2026

CSRIndeX: A Python tool for computing normative CSR benchmarks from SEC filings

Aparna Raj C, Sundaravalli Narayanaswami

Measuring corporate social responsibility (CSR) remains empirically challenging due to the lack of standardised, comparable data on firms’ social and environmental expenditures. While corporate disclosures increasingly reference sustainability and responsibility, actual CSR spending is rarely reported in a consistent, machine-readable format. This paper introduces CSRIndeX, an open-source Python software that addresses this gap by combining disclosure-based CSR measurement with normative spending benchmarks derived from firm profitability. CSRIndeX automatically retrieves Form 10-K filings from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), extracts CSR-related narrative disclosures, and computes coverage-based disclosure breadth (Disclosure Quality, DQ) and thematic balance metrics. In parallel, the software retrieves firm-level net income from the SEC XBRL Company Facts API. It calculates user-defined normative CSR spending targets as a proportion of fiscal-year profits. By explicitly separating descriptive disclosure metrics from normative benchmarks, CSRIndeX provides a transparent and reproducible framework for empirical analysis of CSR, policy evaluation, and comparative research at the firm level.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Dynamic order assignment under warehouse disruption risks: A switching-curve policy, heuristics, and insights

Govind Lal Kumawat, Debjit Roy

E-commerce order fulfillment is increasingly disrupted by natural events such as pandemics, hurricanes, and floods. This study investigates order assignment decisions considering warehouse disruption risk, order-class priority, and shipping costs. We develop a stochastic dynamic programming model for the order assignment problem. Our analysis reveals a switching-curve policy for order assignment. We find that disruption risk significantly affects the order assignment decision, with optimal switching thresholds decreasing as the disruption rate increases. To efficiently compute these thresholds, we develop three index-based heuristic policies. Among them, our improvement heuristic achieves an average optimality gap of 7.21%, outperforming the myopic policy (8.48%) and the least shipping cost heuristic (14.17%). Through a comprehensive numerical study, we uncover several important insights. Disruption and recovery rates have nonlinear effects on order fulfillment costs. Specifically, while investing in mechanisms to enhance recovery speed is beneficial, the gains become progressively smaller as recovery becomes faster. Additionally, shared order-processing capacity at warehouses with class-wise priority can prove a more effective strategy than maintaining dedicated capacities for each order class. This research provides actionable strategies for managing e-commerce fulfillment under warehouse disruption risks, enhancing operational efficiency and cost management.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Gender gap in commute time allocation: analyzing the effects of major life events and urban–rural differences using India’s time use survey

Sandip Chakrabarti, Sagar Verma, Muskan Verma

Gender differences in time use have been studied extensively, thereby informing gender-inclusive policymaking. Differences appear at young ages and change with major life events such as employment, migration, marriage, and childbirth. Since time allocation across activities determines well-being, researchers have analyzed the causes and consequences of such differences to promote multidimensional gender equality. However, although the importance of context-specific analysis of gender gaps in time allocation to commuting and other work-related travel has been emphasized in the literature, countries across the developing world remain relatively less studied. We use India’s Time Use Survey and consider a sample of 24,780 employed persons belonging to 13,501 single-member households or dual-earner nuclear married couple households with or without children to investigate the gender difference in commute time allocation. We find that, relative to men, women allocate significantly less time to commuting. Moreover, this “gender commute gap” is statistically significant in households with young children and persists even in households with older children. An intra-household analysis reveals that the gap is smaller in urban than rural areas, and that intra-household gender differences in unpaid domestic work and childcare responsibilities are associated with the gap within households. Closing the gender commute gap is imperative.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Exploration, Confirmation, and Replication in the Same Observational Study: A Two Team Cross-Screening Approach to Studying the Effect of Unwanted Pregnancy on Mothers’ Later Life Outcomes

Samrat Roy, Marina Bogomolov, Ruth Heller, Amy M. Claridge, Tishra Beeson, Dylan S. Small

The long-term consequences of unwanted pregnancies carried to term on mothers have not been explored much. We use data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) and propose a novel approach, namely two team cross-screening, to study the possible effects of unwanted pregnancies carried to term on various aspects of mothers’ later life mental health, physical health, economic well-being, and life satisfaction. Our approach, unlike existing approaches to observational studies, enables investigators to perform exploratory data analysis, confirmatory data analysis, and replication in the same study. This is a valuable property when there is only one data set available with unique strengths. In two team cross-screening, the investigators split themselves into two teams and the data is split as well according to a meaningful covariate. Each team then performs an exploratory data analysis on its part of the data to design an analysis plan for the other part of the data. The complete freedom of the teams in designing the analysis has the potential to generate new unanticipated hypotheses in addition to a prefixed set of hypotheses. Moreover, only the hypotheses that looked promising in the data each team explored are forwarded for analysis (thus alleviating the multiple testing problem). These advantages are demonstrated in our study of the effects of unwanted pregnancies on mothers’ later life outcomes.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Who exits and who stays in an organization? Core technological knowledge and inventor exit

Mayank Varshney, Amit Jain

A firm's inventors are repositories of its core expertise that constitutes its competitive advantage. This knowledge is subject to erosion when an inventor exits the firm. Little is known, however, about what makes an inventor with core knowledge susceptible to exit. We develop a model of exit in which inventor knowledge may be core, unique, and complex, which determines the likelihood of her or his exit from a firm. We study inventor exit from IBM using a long panel of USPTO data (1975–2010) and find that an inventor with core knowledge is more likely to exit from IBM when she or he has more unique and less complex knowledge. These factors also determine whether the inventor subsequently joins a rival firm or a non–rival firm.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Product Availability, Buying Behavior, and Marketing Action: Insights From a Bottom of the Pyramid Marketplace

Shehzala, Vidya Vemireddy, Anand Kumar Jaiswal

It is argued that improving access to products and services can increase the material well-being of BoP consumers. However, little is known about the kind of products available or consumed at the BoP, particularly if they are essential or non-essential, and the implications of their consumption for a consumer segment with limited resources. BoP ventures have also been criticized for creating economic value for the firm without truly creating social value for BoP consumers, but extant literature includes anecdotal or qualitative evidence, and there is a need for quantitative data on products available and consumed at the retail store level in a BoP marketplace. We address these questions in the present study. Using a mixed-methods research design combining store-level quantitative purchase data (n = 170 individuals over 1 month) with qualitative interviews, we examine product availability and consumption in a BoP marketplace. We find that a majority of available and consumed products are non-essential, with consumption driven by exposure to advertisements, celebrity appeals, lower entry prices and strong distribution. These findings suggest that while marketing actions increase access and consumption, the dominance of non-essential goods limits their potential for meaningful social value creation. We further offer recommendations on how organizations can enhance value creation for the BoP through product, pricing, promotional and distribution strategies

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Journal Articles | 2026

Who is willing to pay for travel time savings and how much? An iterative bidding contingent valuation study in Mumbai

Dale Robbennolt, Hyunjun Hwang, Aishwarya Jaiswal, Sagar Verma, Sandip Chakrabarti, Chandra Bhat

The value of travel time savings is one of the most widely used concepts in the transportation sector, serving as a critical component of transportation project evaluation, policy formulation, and transportation investment decisions. In this paper, we examine the value of travel time savings as measured using an iterative bidding contingent valuation approach in the context of Mumbai, India. By directly measuring the value of travel time savings, rather than imputing it, we are able to efficiently consider variations across individual characteristics and trip contexts. As importantly, we account for the possibility that some individuals may not be willing to pay at all for travel time savings, jointly modeling a binary outcome representing whether an individual is willing to pay at all (WTP) alongside the continuous value of travel time savings among those who are willing to pay. This approach allows us to identify those individuals who have a value of travel time savings (VTTS) of zero, which may occur due to very different psychological reasons than simply having a low value of travel time savings. The findings reveal significant differences in WTP and VTTS across population subgroups and trip characteristics. The results have important implications for the evaluation of transportation policies, prioritization of transportation infrastructure improvements, and development of priced congestion reduction strategies.

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Journal Articles | 2026

The Perils of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Controversies: Implications for a Firm's Financial and Nonfinancial Performance

Amalesh Sharma, Sourav Bikash Borah, Anirban Adhikary, Sanjay Kumar Jena

Although ESG controversies are on the rise, research investigating them yields contradictory findings. The paper provides resolutions to the debate through investigating (a) how ESG controversies influence firms' short-term and long-term financial performance; (b) how firms navigate ESG controversies' effect; and (c) how ESG controversies influence firms' nonfinancial performance. Relying on legitimacy theory, the paper theorizes the relationships and, using 2992 and 2970 firm-year observations, respectively, finds that ESG controversies negatively influence a firm's short- and long-term performance; corporate ESG communication and environmental innovation reduce these effects. Although ESG controversies negatively affect ESG performance, they positively affect carbon emissions, customer complaint controversies, and responsible marketing controversies. To regain legitimacy lost through ESG controversies, firms can invest in supplier ESG training, responsible product development, and CSR committees. The paper contributes to the sustainable business strategy literature and guides managers in managing controversies for a better business environment.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Macroeconomic uncertainty and firm cash holdings: the role of ownership

Janani Rangan, Sanket Mohapatra

During periods of heightened economic uncertainty, firms tend to accumulate more cash due to a precautionary motive. Firms belonging to different ownership groups may vary in their access to sources of finance. Consequently, their response to economic uncertainty could differ. We contribute to the literature by studying the differential impact of economic uncertainty, both global and domestic, on the cash holdings of firms across ownership groups.

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Journal Articles | 2026

A Breakwater of Ignorance:' W.W. Hunter, Epistemic Anxiety, and Gazetteers in mid-Nineteenth Century India

Diki Sherpa, Yugank Goyal

How much did the colonial state ‘truly’ know about India? This question underpinned Sir William Wilson Hunter’s early foundational work, The Annals of Rural Bengal, which marked his entry into colonial knowledge production. In this text, Hunter offered a searing critique of the Company’s ‘unreliable’ and ‘incomplete’ knowledge. This article argues that such anxieties about ignorance, sharpened in the post-1857 imperial order, enabled the colonial state’s investment in local knowledge, culminating in the Gazetteer project. Hunter’s reconstruction of the Santal rebellion of 1855 articulated a sense of anxiety, reframing colonial ignorance as a political problem of governance and diagnosing it as the product of an inadequate colonial knowledge framework revealed in moments of rebellion and administrative delay. In casting ignorance as a political risk, he recast violence as evidence of administrative misrecognition, thereby justifying the need for systematic forms of knowledge production such as the Gazetteer. The article shows how epistemic anxiety was translated into bureaucratic forms of knowledge production, with the Gazetteer institutionalising uncertainty rather than resolving it.

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