Greetings from the Editor’s desk! We hope that you are coping well with the challenges of the Covid 19 pandemic. The print issues of the journal may take longer to reach readers on account of the ongoing disruptions in the postal and courier delivery systems. However, readers may access the journal at https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/iimb-management-review.
We are happy to bring you Volume 32, No. 2, the June 2020 issue, with its regular complement of articles and features.
The Reserve Bank of India has developed guidelines for categorising defaulters of loans into “wilful defaulters” and “others”. In “Wilful defaulters of Indian banks: A first cut analysis”, M Jayadev and Padma N analyse the data on wilful defaulters, and conclude that it is impacted by the low quality of country level governance. The authors suggest that banks must strengthen the “bank governance model” by imposing tighter loan covenants, strict monitoring, and effective governance through bank appointed nominee directors.
In the paper, “Herd behaviour and asset pricing in the Indian stock market”, Yash Chauhan, Nehal Ahmad, Vaishali Aggarwal and Abhijeet Chandra analyse investor behaviour in large- and small-cap stocks. The results find that market-wide aggregate herding is a priced risk factor for large-cap stocks, but not for small-cap stocks. The evidence of the cross-sectional variation contributes to the existing literature on investor behaviour and its implications for asset pricing.
In “Time to payoff: Efficacy of analyst recommendations in the Indian stock market”, Devlina Chatterjee, Saurabh Kumar and Purba Chatterjee examine the efficacy of buy or sell strategies recommended on two different finance portals in India. They analyse the temporal aspect of the efficacy of analyst advice (both technical and fundamental analysts) by building survival analysis models of the time taken to reach the target price mentioned in the recommendations.
Kalyani Mulchandani, Ketan Mulchandani and Pratibha Wasan, in the paper, “Dividends and earnings quality: Evidence from India”, explore the relationship between dividends and earnings quality. They find that dividends do convey information about a firm’s earning quality.
Like mobile commerce (m-commerce), the growth of mobile technologies has opened up many opportunities for service providers for facilitating and personalising customer experiences in tourism. In “M-tourism in India: Symbolic versus intended adoption”, Vinodan A and S Meera study the perception of tourists about factors influencing their symbolic and intended adoption of mobile tourism or m-tourism (tourism activities using mobile devices such as smartphones) applications.
In the paper, “Testing the informativeness of non-price variables with MIDAS touch”, Avinash and T Mallikarjunappa examine the role of non-price information with regard to options (namely, open interest and trading volume measures) to predict the price of the underlying assets in the near future. The results support the proposition that the option’s non-price information (both open interest and volume) are informative in predicting the price of the underlying assets on the day of expiration of options contract.
Mean reversion is an important concept in finance and economics. In the paper, “A new method based on range to detect mean reversion”, Muneer Shaik and Maheswaran S propose a new measure of risk called the expected lifetime range (ELR) ratio, based on high and low prices, and use it to explore the presence of mean reversion in the Indian stock market. They analyse two risk measures, namely, the Lo and MacKinlay (LM) (1988) variance ratio test statistic and their proposed expected lifetime range (ELR) ratio to detect mean reversion in stock returns. They conclude that their new measure, the ELR ratio, is superior to the LM statistic and more conclusive in detecting mean reversion.
The Round Table feature on “Addressing crisis in Indian agriculture through agricultural information delivery” is authored by Aparna Krishna and Gopal Naik, in which they trace the trajectory of agricultural information delivery in India through the decades, the challenges it has faced and how information and communication technology can be leveraged in enhancing the delivery of information to farmers. The review is followed by a panel discussion on the state of agricultural information delivery in India, the challenges and complexities of the process, and the best practices. The panel comprised experts from the government, multinational agencies, academic institutions, and agricultural development institutions.
This issue carries a review of the book “Human + machine: Reimagining work in the age of AI”, Harvard Business Review Press, authored by Paul R Daugherty and H James Wilson. The book is reviewed by Parijat Lanke and Papri Nath.
With best wishes,
Ashok Thampy
Editor-in-Chief
IIMB Management Review
E-mail address: eic@iimb.ac.in
