FIIB Business Review

This article aims to highlight the new experience economy upsurge amidst the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. Undoubtedly, businesses will not be the same post the COVID-19 era, as it brings with itself both a threat and a cautious optimism as far as market offerings are concerned. Making a real difference to the landscape of experiences, therefore, requires a revisit. A ‘Needs-based, Action-oriented and Affiliation-centric’ strategy mix is proposed to be the central plank of any survival design during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, based on the experience economy framework, we present a toolkit that the businesses can use as a blueprint for revival in the long term. The article suggests that the pandemic is here to teach the lesson of building experiences that are robust enough to survive the plunges in the market, personalized enough to retain loyalties, cohesive enough to not get diluted with a change in channel of offering and dramatic enough to keep the engagement alive at all times. Seen in this light, this article is first-of-its-kind attempt to chronicle the potency of the new experience economy measures in navigating through the COVID-19-induced business crisis and envisioning it as a framework pushing for a frugal approach.

Farmers in India have been the victim of systemic neglect and live a marginalized life. Crop failure due to natural calamities and unfavourable climatic conditions puts farmers in a challenging situation leading to extreme hopelessness and suicides. This article provides an overview of the crop insurance scheme, Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) launched in India by Mr. Narendra Modi in 2016. PMFBY has poor state support, unviable subsidy model, delayed claim settlement and skewed benefit pattern. A technology-enabled demand-driven approach is recommended. Crop insurance should be delinked from political affiliation. Velocity, variety and verifiability in PMFBY will make crop insurance scheme work better for farmers than insurers, administrators and politicians.

Franklin Templeton started its Indian operations in the year 1996. On 24th April 2020 it made an announcement that it would be winding up Franklin India Credit Risk Fund and five other funds. This case is about the debacle of Franklin India Credit Risk Fund. Liquidity crisis in the debt market due to various events that happened in 2019, exposure towards debt instruments that turned risky (such as Yes Bank and Vodafone), reduction of inflows, redemption pressure, debt market becoming illiquid due to COVID-19 pandemic, were cited as some of the reasons for winding up of Franklin India Credit Risk Fund. The important thing to note is that when other credit risk funds have not taken the decision of winding up, why Franklin India Credit Risk Fund took this call? This case presents an opportunity to the students to analyse the factors that have contributed to the debacle and whether the decision taken is correct?

The study examines the research literature pertaining to the informational content of open interest and transaction volume in a systematic manner. Our review upheld their informational role in estimating the price of the underlying stock in future, in predicting future volatility and in ascertaining the market behaviour around corporate/macro-economic announcements with mixed directional effect. Further, through well-defined inclusion/exclusion criteria, we choose 38 research works to uncover the factors and conditions upon which open interest and transaction volume are more informative via meta-regression. The temporal and spatial factors indicate that open interest and transaction volume are more informative in an emerging market as compared to a developed market.

Stock market volatility may be a function of company, industry, or world over information made public. The present study has investigated the volatility of Indian banking sectoral indices with the general banking index for two shocking events: the Sub-prime crisis and COVID-19. A comparative analysis of both the shocks leading to these indices’ volatility has been conducted using symmetric and asymmetric models. This study’s findings show that these indices’ volatile behaviour has been strong enough to persist in the market with the leverage effect present during the sub-prime crisis. This effect disappeared for Nifty Bank Indices and Private Sector Bank Indices as compared to Public Sector Undertaking Bank Indices during COVID-19 (probably because the pandemic is not over yet). With GARCH and EGARCH models, the study suggests that the investors may use the diversification approach, in the long run, to safeguard their portfolio values to survive from global shocks.

Some of the major tourist destinations in India are also reeling under terror. This study examines the causal relationship between terrorism and tourism and economy impact in the Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, Assam and Manipur using the asymmetric nonlinear autoregressive-distributed lag (NARDL) approach. The study is an attempt to investigate the ‘tourism–terrorism–economy’ relationship which has hitherto been not widely studied. The estimates based on the Granger causality approach demonstrate that there is causality among terrorism, tourism and economic growth (proxied by state gross domestic products—SGDP) in the short run for all the three study states. The results indicate positive relation between SGDP and tourism in all the three states and between SGDP and terrorism in Assam and Manipur. However, the relation between SGDP and terrorism is negative for Jammu and Kashmir. The results indicate that the relation between the three study variables is highly contextual and cannot be generalized across tourist destinations.

This article examines the performance of initial public offerings (IPOs) issued by the economic sectors in India. It analyses the level of underpricing measured by market adjusted initial return (MAIR), short-run performance measured by market-adjusted abnormal return (MAAR) and long-run performance measured by 3-year buy and hold abnormal return (BHAR) methodology relative to Sensex and Nifty for 40 IPOs approaching the capital market during the period 2006–2016. The selection of IPOs is based on the foreign direct investment (FDI) limit of USD 3,000 million in each economic sector, that is, primary sector, secondary sector and tertiary sector. The long-run analysis is done at the end of the first year, the second year and the third year. It is found using the ordinary least square (OLS) regression that variables like age of the issuing firm and volume traded on the first day of listing have a positive relation with initial returns, while offer size of the IPO has a negative relation with the initial return. Further, this study also finds out that the secondary sector performs poorly in the long run relative to the primary and tertiary sectors. This study can be of importance to investors for assessing different sectors before investing.

This intention of this research article is to analyze the impact of research and development (R&D) activities on the financial performance of Indian pharmaceutical companies listed with the national stock exchange (NSE) of India. Strongly balanced panel dataset of 40 sample pharmaceutical companies for the period of 1998-2019 (21 years) has been used. In the empirical analysis section: Descriptive Statistics, Bivariate Correlation Matrix, Variation Inflation Factor, Skewness/Kurtosis Tests, Breusch-Godfrey LM Test, Heteroskedasticity Test, Levin-Lin-Chu Unit-Root Test, Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and panel regression models (Fixed Effect Model and Random Effect Model) followed by Hausman Test have been discussed. For data analysis purpose, STATA (version 12.0) software has been used. To analyze the impact of R&D on financial performance, four different financial performance related variables: Sales Turnover, Return on Assets, Return on Equity, and Market Capitalization have been used as dependent variables and these variables have been placed one after another in four different empirical models which have been estimated in this study. The study has revealed that there is a significant positive impact of R&D activities on the financial performance of Indian pharmaceutical companies listed with NSE during the study period.