Editorial
It is my pleasure to bring you the first issue of IIMB Management Review (IMR) for the year 2020 and to give you a brief update on the journal and its activities.
IMR continues to grow in strength on all fronts. We see an increase in the number of submissions year-on-year, while our rates of rejection continue to be around 90%. The journal is listed in the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Quality Journal List where it is ranked “B”; it is indexed on the abstract and citation database Scopus, and on the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). We invite you to view the journal metrics at https://www.journals.elsevier.com/iimb-management-review/.
We are happy to inform you that Professor E S Srinivas and Professor Rejie George have joined our panel of Associate Editors. We thank the outgoing Associate Editors, Professor Joshy Jacob and Professor Sougata Ray for their guidance and services to the journal.
The eleventh annual doctoral colloquium, the IMR Doctoral Conference (IMRDC), was held on 27th and 28th December, 2019. The two-day conference consisting of paper presentations and invited talks, panel discussions and workshops has established itself as the flagship event for doctoral students in Management and associated disciplines. The Conference Chairs for IMRDC 2019-20 were Professor Shabana Mitra and Professor Pearl Malhotra of IIM Bangalore. The submitted papers were taken through a rigorous review process and of the 90 papers, 10 papers were selected for presentation at the conference. The keynote lecture at the conference was delivered by Professor James Foster, Oliver T. Carr Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics at the George Washington University, on "The Role of Inequality in Poverty Measurement". One of the avowed aims of the IMR Doctoral Conference is to help take doctoral research work towards eventual publication. As an effort in this direction, a workshop titled “From Paper to Publication” was held, led by Professor Rejie George, IIMB, and Professor Sanchari Roy, King’s College, London. You will find more details about IMRDC 2019-20 at https://www.iimb.ac.in/imr-doctoral-conference.
This issue of the journal contains its regular complement of articles and features. Here is a brief of each of the articles.
In their paper, “Can Leverage Effect Coexist with Value Effect?”, Moinak Maiti and A Balakrishnan evaluate the cross-sectional relationship between firm characteristics, financial leverage, and stock returns for the Indian stock market. The results confirm that a three-factor model based on beta, size, and leverage is comparatively better in capturing risk-return relationship as compared to the Fama-French (1993) three factor model with beta, size, and value.
In the paper, “Market Timing Skill of Foreign Portfolio Investors in India”, K N Badhani and Ashish Kumar raise the question, “How much profit do foreign institutional investors (FIIs) earn on their investment in India?” Their results suggest that FIIs do not show superior market timing skills.
In “A Tripartite Inquiry into Financial Liberalisation–Volatility–Information Asymmetry Nexus: Global Panel Approach”, Rahul Roy and Santhakumar Shijin examine the financial liberalisation–volatility–information asymmetry nexus across emerging and developed economies. The findings of the study put forth the argument that the linkage between financial liberalisation and volatility largely depends on the country-specific economic development status of the economies.
In “Price Formation in Indian Gold Market: Analysing the Role of Gold Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) Against Spot and Futures Market”, Prabhdeep Kaur and Jaspal Singh attempt to explore the dynamics of the relationship between gold ETFs and spot price of gold as well as between gold ETFs and gold futures in India using conventional and threshold cointegration analysis. They find that movements in spot prices and futures prices are found to lead those in ETF prices, thus, providing scope for executing profitable trading strategies in ETFs.
Taking note of the difference between the academic interest in momentum investing as an investment strategy tool and its practical application, Sabyasachi Mohapatra and Arun Kumar Misra, in their paper, “Momentum Returns: A Portfolio-Based Empirical Study to Establish Evidence, Factors and Profitability in Indian Stock Market”, attempt to ascertain the existence of portfolio-level momentum returns in the Indian equity markets. Their study also identifies the contribution of firm-specific and macroeconomic factors in the said returns.
With professional sport having become big business in recent times, an effective ranking system which can reflect the true picture of the current form of a player has become necessary. “Key Performance Indicators for Factor Score Based Ranking in One Day International (ODI) Cricket”, by Prashant Premkumar, Jimut Bahan Chakrabarty, and Shovan Chowdhury introduces a ranking system for batsmen and bowlers in cricket using factor analysis approach with a set of variables that are effective in capturing the true performance of a player (batsman/bowler). According to the authors their ranking method tries to address some of the issues in the prevalent ICC rankings system, and introduces a more robust ranking system.
Increasingly researchers and policy makers are subscribing to the more moderate view of microcredit as being necessary but not sufficient for poverty alleviation. In “Inflexible Microcredit Contracts and Their Discontents: A Theoretical Perspective Based on Consumer Psychology” by Rahul Kumar Sett, the potential effects of inflexible microcredit contracts on the financial decision-making of poor consumers are investigated while assessing and challenging the operating assumptions of the MFIs, based mainly on the tenets of consumer psychology. The untenable supply side considerations on the basis of which many MFIs offer such inflexible contracts, are assessed based on two fundamental factors characterising the psychological underpinnings of decision-making among the poor: time horizon neglect, and the perceived lack of autonomy.
The round table article, “Analytics Education”, by U Dinesh Kumar first discusses the main aspects of analytics education that are necessary to equip students with the required knowledge and skills, and the associated challenge to prepare students to not just learn with the data but also to think with the data. This is followed by a panel discussion among leading practitioners and educationists who address questions such as the challenges in the field of analytics education, the skills required for a data scientist to solve real world problems, and how educationists can contribute in building the data science ecosystem that is continuously receptive to the changing needs of the users.
This issue also carries a review essay by Vivek Moorthy of the book “The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind”, authored by Raghuram G. Rajan and published by Harper Collins India.
Best wishes,
Ashok Thampy
Editor-in-Chief
IIMB Management Review