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3890 items in total found

Working Papers | 2026

Credit Reallocation and Exporting: Evaluating the IBC Reforms in India

Padmabati Nayak

This paper studies whether strengthening creditor rights improves the allocation of capital toward productive exporting firms. I examine India’s Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) of 2016, which introduced a time-bound insolvency resolution framework and strengthened creditor control. Using firm-level data from CMIE Prowess and a difference-in-differences design, I test whether the reform relaxed financing constraints for firms with high marginal returns to capital (MRPK). I find that following the IBC, high-MRPK exporting firms experience a significant increase in export intensity, investment, and long-term domestic borrowing relative to other firms. In contrast, foreign borrowing remains unchanged, suggesting that the reform primarily improved access to domestic credit markets. The findings imply that

stronger insolvency institutions can improve allocative efficiency by channeling capital toward productive but financially constrained firms. More broadly, the paper highlights the  role of creditor rights in shaping export performance and resource allocation in emerging economies.

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Working Papers | 2026

Creditor Rights, State-Owned Banks, and Investment Efficiency: Evidence from SARFAESI Act

Vishal Vaibhav

I examine whether firms borrowing exclusively from government-owned banks respond differently to SARFAESI Act and how it affects the investment efficiency. I find that firms borrowing exclusively from government-owned banks experience a significant increase in investment inefficiency following the reform. I also find the increase in inefficiency is concentrated among firms with high levels of tangible assets, suggesting that collateral enforcement is the primary mechanism driving the results.

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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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Journal Articles | 2026

Internationalization and data capabilities: An institutional void perspective

Bibek Bhattacharya, Lakshmi Goyal, Rajarshi Mukherjee, Adrija Majumdar

In today's rapidly evolving global economy, although data intelligence has become a critical capability for firms seeking to thrive in competitive markets, not all firms are inclined to invest in it. Addressing this under-examined aspect, our study examines which firms invest more in data intelligence capabilities. Situating this study in an emerging market context, we predict that the extent of internationalization pursued by emerging economy firms is positively related to their investments in data intelligence capabilities. We further develop competing hypotheses to suggest that the quality of the home country institutions moderates the above-mentioned baseline relationship. We test our predictions on a sample of 3851 Indian firms from 1996 to 2022 and find support for our baseline hypothesis. We also find that with the improvement in the quality of home country institutions, firms with a higher degree of internationalization invest more in data intelligence capabilities. Our findings contribute to research on institutional theory, institutional voids, and the literature on internationalization by emerging economy firms.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Family Ownership and CSR Overspending: Evidence from India on the Mediating Role of CSR Committee Composition

Pooja Thakur-Wernz, Chitra Singla, Olga Bruyaka

Why do some firms voluntarily exceed legally mandated requirements for corporate social responsibility (CSR)? We examine this question in the context of India, an emerging economy where the Companies Act of 2013 mandates eligible firms to spend 2% of profits on CSR. This institutional setting provides a clear benchmark for identifying firms’ CSR overspending, voluntary spending beyond the mandated threshold, as a substantive form of CSR engagement rather than compliance. Drawing on agency and stakeholder theories, we argue that family ownership influences CSR overspending through specific governance mechanisms: (a) overlapping membership between CSR and stakeholder relations committees and (b) female representation on the CSR committee. From an agency perspective, family owners pursue non-economic objectives such as preserving the family’s legacy and reputation. From a stakeholder perspective, they are particularly attentive to maintaining societal legitimacy. We propose that as family ownership increases, CSR governance becomes less oriented toward CSR spending compliance and more toward stakeholder preferences, leading to CSR overspending. Using panel data from 601 publicly listed Indian firms (2015–2024), we find robust empirical support for our research model. Our findings suggest that in a context where family ownership is widespread, CSR overspending represents a strategic choice shaped by family owners’ preferences and channeled through CSR governance mechanisms. This study contributes to research on family-firm ethics and CSR governance in emerging economies by clarifying how ownership and CSR committee composition influence CSR spending beyond compliance.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Men in Beauty Work and Feminization of Digital Labor Platforms

Sai Amulya Komarraju, Manisha Pathak-Shelat, Payal Arora, Usha Raman

Extant research on the gendered dynamics on digital labor platforms and care work is divided in terms of focus: (migrant) men involved in supposedly “masculine” work such as driving and delivery, and home-based repair work, and the feminized invisible work performed by women in home-based care-work such as domestic work and beauty work. While such scholarship has merit, it completely dismisses the particularities of the South Asian context where beauty work, considered to be ritually impure work, has historically been performed by men from the marginalized Nai caste. Foregrounding the views of men in beauty work, particularly Nai-barbers (on and off platform), our findings reveal that Nai-barbers find the relocation of work from barbershop to customer’s home by platforms particularly humiliating. The transition from being entrepreneurs, in charge of their barbershops, to mere workers supervised by both platforms and customers, evokes memories of the servitude their ancestors endured. The humiliation and degradation of work they experience are rooted in caste and colonial histories. Our findings underscore the need to go beyond the immediate temporal context to identify the conditions of work that workers find degrading, and situate the feminization of platform economy within the context of coloniality and casticization of power, thus bringing a necessary intersectionality that recognizes but goes beyond gender.

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Journal Articles | 2026

Protection of capacitated hubs under demand uncertainty: a robust optimization approach

Sneha Dhyani Bhatt, Sachin Jayaswal, Ankur Sinha

Existing hub protection problems primarily consider deterministic demand and accordingly allocate protection resources to the most vulnerable hubs in the network that are at risk of attack. We study the protection problem of a capacitated hub-and-spoke network under the risk of an attack when the demand is uncertain. To model this, we propose a multi-level capacitated u-hub protection problem, with the network operator’s protection decision at the first level. At the second level, we model the interdiction problem of the network evader who intends to attack r hubs to maximise the post-interdiction re-routing cost of the network operator. At the third level, the network operator minimises the re-routing cost through the surviving hubs under the worst-case realisation of the demand, which is drawn from different robust uncertainty sets, namely, column, ellipsoidal, hose, and hybrid. A dual-based single-level reduction is proposed for the interdiction problem, which is then used within an implicit enumeration algorithm to solve the overall protection problem. We also propose tight values for bigM that are introduced due to complementary slackness conditions upon single-level reduction. Based on extensive experiments on the well-known CAB Dataset, we discuss several managerial and computational insights under different network parameter settings and uncertain scenarios.

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