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The primary purpose is to investigate the dynamic relationships among urbanization, energy use and environmental pollution in the context of India from 1971 to 2018. The paper also examines the validity of Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis in the present Indian context.

The study uses a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag cointegration test (Shin et al., 2014) to investigate the dynamic relationship among the mentioned variables. The Wald test is also used to statistically check the presence of asymmetry. Additionally, the VECM test is applied to examine the causality among the variables.

This study documents that urbanization in India is good for environment in the long run, whereas energy consumption is bad for the environment. It also finds that positive and negative shocks of energy and urbanization exert asymmetric impacts on ecological footprint. Furthermore, the results could not validate the EKC hypothesis for India.

The outcome of the study suggests designing an environmental policy which considers the nonlinearity of the investigated relationships and bearing in mind the use of comprehensive indicator like ecological footprint is equally important to address the wide-ranging problem of the environment. Policy reorientation towards the production and consumption of green energy, investment in research and development, and use of efficient technology is very crucial to achieve sustainable outcomes in the long run.

In this study, the researchers use the ‘ecological footprint’ variable to obtain a more accurate and comprehensive assessment of environmental deterioration. The mentioned dynamic relationships are investigated using an improved methodology of the NARDL model, which assumes the asymmetric impact of the explanatory variables on the response variable. The novelty of this study lies in examining the non-linear impact of urbanization and energy on ecological footprint which is inadequately addressed in the context of Indian economy.

Globally, India ranks third in greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions. Decarbonizing India's economy would necessitate significant changes in how the country generates energy, manufactures things, delivers services and manages natural resources. Recently, scholars from different parts of the world have used various indicators like carbon and methane emissions to investigate potential solutions to the global warming problem that has resulted in climate change. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the impact of foreign direct investment, renewable and non-renewable energy consumption, in addition to economic growth, trade openness, and natural resources on ecological footprint.

Using India's yearly data from 1990 to 2016, this research investigates the impact of direct foreign investment (FDI), trade (TA) and natural resources (NR) on the ecological footprint (EF) within the framework of economic growth (GDP), renewable (RE) and non-renewable (NRE) energy consumption. The Zivot–Andrews unit root approach was used to examine the structural breaks in data series and the presence of stationary. An auto regressive distributive lag model was used to investigate the presence of long-run and short-run dynamic relationships among the variables.

The empirical findings demonstrate that FDI, RE and GDP have a negative and substantial impact on EF in the long term; in contrast, NRE and TA are significant and positive. The Granger causality test indicates that feedback transmission was observed between NR and EF and TA and EF. One-way causation passed from GDP to FDI and NR; TA to FDI and RE.

Indian Government and authorities should push for an eco-friendly manufacturing process and technology adaptation to improve environmental quality.

This study investigates the asymmetric influence of renewable energy consumption (REC) and trade openness (TO) in the pathway of decarbonizing of Indian economy.

By exploiting fifty years of annual time series data spanning from 1970 to 2019 with the augmentation of nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag technique with the consideration of GDP and industry value added (IVA) as control variables.

Our This research not only demonstrates the asymmetric association among the employed variables but also shows that negative shock to REC stimulates emissions, where as positive shock on the same policy variable promotes environmental quality improvement. Negative shock to TO is found to be associated with the corresponding increase of environmental quality, but the positive shock on the same intensifies environmental pollution. IVA is also found to be associated with intensifying environmental squalor. In addition, the research provides the empirical evidence of existence of “EKC” hypothesis in India as long-run coefficient associated with GDP looks smaller than short-run coefficient of GDP.

It was difficult to include may other causal variables due to nonavailability of data pertaining to those variables.

Moreover, some policy guidelines have also been recommended for India at the end that may aid India to achieve net zero emissions by 2070.

This is an original research paper carried out by the authors and has not yet been submitted elsewhere.

The eco-innovation is considered one of the possible ways to tackle climate change. However, the conflicting empirical evidence related to the role of eco-innovation on environmental quality becomes a motivation to explore the effect of eco-innovation on environmental degradation proxied by ecological footprint. Besides, it controls economic growth, remittance inflows, trade openness and total energy consumption in the environmental degradation function.

Uses the Augmented Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (AARDL) approach to examine the cointegration relation among the series during the period ranging from 1975 to 2017 for India within the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework.

The result suggests that eco-innovation can mitigate climate change by reducing the ecological footprint. Similarly, economic growth reduces the ecological footprint in the short- and long-run. However, the square of economic growth is positive and significant. Thus, it shows evidence against the conventional EKC hypothesis. The results also reveal that remittance inflows have an insignificant negative role on the ecological footprint, while total energy consumption and trade openness harm the environment by enhancing the ecological footprint.

This study provides important implications for climate change mitigation. Thus, the government should promote eco-innovation to mitigate climate change by offering a favorable legal environment to the firms to adopt the same in their production and consumption activities. It also suggests that initiatives like green strategies should give serious attention while incurring research expenditure.

No prior studies assess the impact of eco-innovation on the ecological footprint for the period of 1975–2017 in India.

The purpose of this study is twofold. Firstly, the study has investigated the changing scenario of gender bias in households' education expenditure and the socioeconomic factors responsible for it. Secondly, the study has estimated the inequality in education expenditure for the male and female students and determined the significance of socioeconomic variables in gender discrimination.

To address the above-mentioned issues, this paper has used the unit-level data of NSSO 52nd, 64th, 71st and 75th rounds from 1995–1996 to 2017–2018. The log linear regression model is applied to estimate factor impending average education expenditure dynamics. The Oaxaca–Blinder Decomposition method has been employed to measure gender discrimination, and the Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient are used to assess inequality among girls experiencing prejudice.

The study has discovered an gender bias in education expenditure against females during the study period in India. Further, it has been found that gender discrimination against girl students is decreasing. Moreover, the factors such as age, religion, castes, MPCE (income quantile), type of institution, present enrolment and type of education are responsible for this gender differences.

This paper uses 20 years of household-level data for study and suggests that discriminatory behaviour of households and credit constraints of the underdeveloped countries prevent investment in girl's education. Therefore, the state must pay for education of girls by offering scholarships and free or heavily subsidized education. In addition to this, awareness programs for gender equality should also be implemented by the government, especially in rural areas.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-08-2022-0537.

The export competitiveness has only calculated on only two aspects either comparatively advantageous or comparatively disadvantageous products for India or China. There is not any thorough study that has been undertaken for Indian manufacturing sector at a segregated level along with that of China. So, in the light of these shortcomings, the purpose of this study is to analyse the dynamics of export competitiveness of indian manufacturing sector vis-à-vis its emerging counterpart, china in the global market.

A modified revealed comparative advantage index has been used in two different phases of 2001–08 and 2010–18 to find the dynamic pattern of manufacturing exports of India and China in the world market.

The study revealed that India has shown a positive response in increasing its competitive positioned products from low-technology to medium-technology products during the study period. There has been a decline in the competitive positioned products of China and simultaneously China’s threatened product lines have shown an immense increment over the years. Moreover, Indian exports are concentrated to few low-technology and resource-intensive products, that share more than 50% of total exported value for its manufacturing in the global market, whereas, China is much diversified and the exported value is more scattered over its manufactured items.

The study does not include the factors that impacted the export competitiveness of the sample economies and thus adds a limitation to this study.

As there is very limited research on dynamics of export competitiveness of Indian manufacturing exports at harmonised system 6-digit level with China, this study fulfils the gap.

The present study assesses the commercial bank profit efficiency and its relationship to banking sector competition in a rapidly growing emerging economy, India from 2009 to 2019 using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA).

Lerner indices, conventional and efficiency-adjusted, quantify competition. Two SFA models are employed to calculate alternative profit efficiency (inefficiency) scores: the two-step time-decay approach proposed by Battese and Coelli (1992) and the recently developed single-step pairwise difference estimator (PDE) by Belotti and Ilardi (2018). In the first step of the BC92 framework, profit inefficiency is calculated, and in the second step, Tobit and Fractional Regression Model (FRM) are utilized to evaluate profit inefficiency correlates. PDE concurrently solves the frontier and inefficiency equations using the maximum likelihood process.

The results suggest that foreign banks are less profit efficient than domestic equivalents, supporting the “home-field advantage” hypothesis in India. Further, increasing competition drives bank managers to make riskier lending and investment choices, decreasing bank profit efficiency. However, this effect varies depending on bank ownership and size.

Literature on the competition bank efficiency link is conspicuously scant, with a focus on technical and cost efficiency. Less is known regarding the influence of competition on bank profit efficiency. The article is one of the first to examine commercial bank profit efficiency and its relationship to banking sector competition. Additionally, the study work represents one of the first applications of the FRM presented by Papke and Wooldridge (1996) and the PDE provided by Belotti and Ilardi (2018).

This study aims to examine the association between mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) regulations (CSR mandate) and social disclosures (SOCDS) in India. It also investigates whether CSR committees mediate the relationship between CSR mandate and SOCDS. Furthermore, this paper explores how business group (BG) affiliation moderates CSR committee quality and SOCDS.

This study uses a data set of 5,345 observations from the Bombay stock exchange (BSE)-listed firms over 10 years (2011–2020) to examine the research questions. Baron and Kenny’s (1986) three-step model is estimated to examine the mediating role of CSR committees on the relationship between CSR mandate and SOCDS.

The study reveals that the CSR mandate positively impacts SOCDS in India due to coercive pressures. CSR committees mediate this relationship, with higher CSR committee quality leading to increased SOCDS. Furthermore, the authors report that SOCDS in India is positively related to CSR committee quality, and this relationship is stronger for BG firms. Finally, the supplementary analysis reveals that promoting CSR committee quality enhances firms’ likelihood of meeting CSR mandatory spending and actual CSR spending in India.

This research contributes to the academic literature by shedding light on the intricate dynamics of CSR mandates, CSR committees and SOCDS in emerging economies. Notably, the authors identify the previously unexplored mediation role of CSR committees in the link between CSR mandates and SOCDS. The creation of a composite index that measures complementary CSR committee attributes allows us to undertake a novel assessment of CSR committee quality. An examination of the moderating influence of BG affiliation documents the importance of CSR committee quality, particularly in governance, for enhancing SOCDS transparency within BG firms.

This chapter tries to capture the disparity in expenditure on primary education based on gender among the religious groups (Hindu, Muslim, and Christian) in rural India. The gender gap in education expenditure for a certain demographic group is calculated using the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition approach. Further, we tried to identify the various household-related factors which might influence the decision of spending on a child's education. We used the 75th-level National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) unit-level dataset of July 2017 to June 2018 (one academic year) to obtain data on education expenditure and other household factors which play a manifesting role in the gender gap in expenditure on education. Our finding suggests that the total differential (log mean boys education expenditure-log mean girls education expenditure) is positive among all religious groups signifying the gender bias in education expenditure. We also found that the magnitude of the “Unexplained Effect” component is higher compared to the “Explained Effect” component signifying that the treatment of characteristics by students differs by their sex at elementary education. Household size and if household members are employed on a casual basis, then their expenditure on education falls on the other hand income of the household, a household with computer availability and household member engaged in regular wage/salary earning plays a positive role in expenditure on primary education in rural India.

The study analyzes the relationship between homeownership and financial investment of households in the context of emerging markets like India. It also examines how homeownership affects the portfolio decisions of Indian households.

Using the nationally representative All-India Debt and Investment Survey of 2019 and employing an instrumental variable approach, the authors analyze the relationship between homeownership and the share of financial assets held by Indian households. The study also employs several sensitivity checks, including alternate estimation techniques and alternative definitions of the housing variables, and accounts for additional factors to ensure that the authors are able to capture the effect of homeownership on the outcome variable.

The analysis suggests homeownership crowds out financial investment in India due to high repair and maintenance costs. The negative effect is mainly observed in urban households. Further, the findings imply that homeownership leads households to reallocate their asset portfolio. Homeowners have a lower share in liquid short term deposits, indicating the high liquidity risk of their portfolios. On the other hand, homeownership increases the share of long term retirement funds along with no effect on risky asset share. The authors observe that the crowding out effect is more striking for younger households and poorer households with low income, and the effect is lower for indebted households.

The findings underscore the need for financial awareness programs so that housing does not crowd out liquid investments of households. Additionally, the results highlight that policies should first focus on young and poor households as the negative effect is more prominent for these groups. Finally, there is scope for policies to support repair and maintenance costs incurred by vulnerable households to reduce the negative effect of housing on liquid financial investments.

This paper is among the few studies that provide insights into how homeownership relates to financial investment and portfolio decisions in the context of an emerging economy. Furthermore, the heterogeneous effects based on poor economic status and age underscore the need for complementary policies.