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The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) substantially lowered the corporate tax rate, making tax-exempt municipal bond issues less attractive investments for banks, savings and loan associations and insurance companies. To provide a benefit for small issuers the current Internal Revenue Code has a special provision that allows banks and S&Ls to deduct 80% of the borrowing costs for “bank-qualified” bonds – tax-exempt bonds from issuers who issue no more than $10 million in bonds during a year. This study examines whether the relationship between the true interest cost (TIC) on bank-qualified bonds and other tax-exempt bonds changed with the passage of the TCJA.

Using linear regression analysis this paper compares the TIC of bank-qualified bonds with the TIC of bonds not bank-qualified using a sample of bonds both before and after the passage of TCJA.

Prior to the passage of the TCJA, this study observes that these “bank-qualified” bond issues had a lower true interest cost than other tax-exempt bond issues; however, after passage of the TCJA, the difference in the true interest cost between “bank-qualified” bond issues and other tax-exempt bond issues dramatically decreased.

It appears that the benefit for small bond issuers is greatly reduced after corporate tax rates were significantly lowered. If federal lawmakers wish small issuers to have the same advantage over other tax-exempt municipal bond issuers after passage of TCJA, some changes will need to be made to the Internal Revenue Code to give small issuers an additional advantage when issuing tax-exempt debt.

No other empirical research to date has examined the impact of TCJA on bank-qualified bond issue interest cost.

This paper aims to explore whether firms’ performance determines innovation using a sample of Indian manufacturing firms. The impact of innovation on firms’ performance across specific countries has been discussed in the literature. However, the effect of firms’ performance on innovation output, especially for a developing country like India, remains an open question. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates whether firms’ performance determines innovation in Indian manufacturing firms.

The authors use patent filing information to instrument innovation and total factor productivity to instrument firms’ performance. The patent data are collected from the Patent Search and Analysis Software database and firm-level data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy’s Prowess database. The study uses a sample of 309 Indian manufacturing firms from 2005 to 2021. Given the count nature of the data set used in this study coupled with over-dispersion issues, the authors have used the negative binomial regression to estimate the empirical specification of the models. There could be a possible problem of endogeneity due to the contemporary nature of innovation and firms’ performance. Therefore, to address the possible issues of endogeneity in the model, the authors have used the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimators for more robustness checks of the empirical results.

The empirical results exhibit a positive and significant impact of firms’ performance on the innovation output, validating that firms’ performance determines innovation in Indian manufacturing firms. The posterior estimation results using GMM estimation also corroborate that firms’ productivity is a determining factor for the innovation output of Indian manufacturing firms. Furthermore, empirical results exhibit that the ex ante innovativeness of the firms substantially affects the current innovation. This validates that the firms’ prior experience, learning by doing and past innovative efforts are more likely to precipitate more innovation in the current period.

This paper’s main contribution is empirically estimating whether firms’ performance determines innovation, which is hardly discussed in the existing innovation literature, specifically using Indian manufacturing industries. Further, it adds to the existing literature in two other prominent ways. First, this paper investigates whether firms require ex ante expertise to innovate or if a firm starting from scratch can innovate significantly without any hindrances. Second, it enriches the literature by instrumenting innovation in output terms with the patent application against input measures of innovation, such as research and development expenditures, acquisition of machinery and equipment, while discussing the relationship between firms’ performance and innovation, specifically in the context of a developing economy like India.

Teaching wine tasting online is challenging, even given the curated digital tools of the Wine and Spirit Education Trust, a highly renowned online wine certification system is used. This paper aims to initially explore wine experts’ opinions about online wine education and subsequently examine the feasibility of customizing wine appreciation lexicons for Chinese learners.

A two-study multimethod approach was adopted. Study 1, a two-stage Delphi study, was conducted with 17 wine experts representing a number of countries, using a mix of closed/open-ended questions in an online survey. Data was collected in a market study in Study 2, conducted at agricultural markets in Thailand (pilot test) and China. Dialogues with market sellers were undertaken, evoking mental imagery of wine descriptors to explore the relevance of traditional versus local aromas and flavors in describing wine.

Findings concentrate on three main areas: general advantages/disadvantages of online wine education, reactions toward asynchronous/synchronous methods of wine tasting and, finally, the feasibility of customizing a wine appreciation lexicon for Chinese learners.

The study presents novel insights into the role of online wine education in China.

This study aims to understand how climatic drivers of change will affect rural communities living in the hot semiarid region of Bhokardan Taluka of Jalna district in the Indian state of Maharashtra. In the context of the economic and social change they are experiencing, the concern is to evolve ways that enable them to cope with, adapt to and benefit from these challenges.

The focus of most of the climate change studies is on the short- to long-term trends of weather parameters such as rainfall, temperature and extreme weather events. The impact of climate variability and changing patterns on the local communities, the local economy, livelihoods and social life in specific geographies is less explored.

As the impacts of climatic and nonclimatic drivers of change are cross-sectoral, diverse, multidimensional, interlinked and dynamic, this study has adopted a transdisciplinary “research-in-use” approach involving multidisciplinary teams covering the aspects such as changes in land use and land cover, surface and groundwater status, edaphic conditions, crops and livestock, climate analysis including projected changes, socioeconomic analysis, people’s experience of climate variability and their current coping strategies and resilience (vulnerability) analysis of communities and various livelihood groups.

The study was based on the peoples’ perspective and recommendation based on the local communities ability to cope up with climate change. However, a statistical analysis perspective is missing in the present study.

Based on these findings, a set of implementation-focused recommendations are made that are aimed at conserving and enhancing the resilience of the foundations that uphold and sustain the social and economic well-being of the rural communities in Bhokardan taluka, namely, land, water, agriculture, livestock, food and nutrition security, livelihoods, market access and social capital.

This chapter argues that football is central to specific regional, hegemonic masculinities within colonial histories and continuities in South India. Through ethnographic narratives of a prominent football figure associated with the Malabar Special Police, this chapter shows how different performances of a particular mode of masculinity draw power from multiple sites such as regional class networks, colonial legacies, and postcolonial sport. This work demonstrates how a (post) colonial space shores up the powers associated with a male sporting figure. The regional format of a sport is as important as the global format in producing regional, hegemonic masculinity. Analysing the powers and aura associated with this sporting figure helps one to understand the specific meanings of desire and aspirations for status and stability among a section of men in a South Indian context.

This paper aims to analyse the pattern of structural transformation and productivity growth of 15 major Indian states at a ten-sector level of disaggregation from 1983 to 2017.

The analysis has been carried over in a ten-sector disaggregated level through construction of the labour and output data from various micro data sets.

The majority of Indian states have bypassed the stage of industrialization, wherein labour previously engaged in agriculture has transitioned directly into the modern services sector while skipping the manufacturing. There are no sign of convergence of sectoral productivities and the heterogeneity among Indian states persists throughout the time period. The growth performance of states are not positively associated with the movement of labour across sectors as measured by the structural transformation index (STI). This goes against the narrative that structural transformation help reduce the misallocation of factors. Despite an increase in educational attainment of workers across all sectors, more than one-third of agricultural workers still remain either illiterate or lack formal schooling. Among sectors, construction (C) and trade, hotels and restaurants (THR) have absorbed the majority of workers who have left agricultural jobs. Finance, insurance, real estate and business services (FIRB), electricity, gas and water supply (EGWS) and mining and quarrying (MQ) are the three sectors that have seen significant gains in labour productivity during the study period.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyse structural change and productivity growth in the Indian economy using Indian states as critical geographical marker. The results are new and add value to the literature.

This paper aims to present a comprehensive overview of open-access publications by Indian non-profit organizations over the past two decades. The study explores the growth, licensing patterns, citations, authorship patterns and other parameters to understand the scholarly output.

The study involves data collection from OpenAlex scholarly catalog. Data analysis uses OpenRefine, a data carpentry tool, to examine and extract various aspects of scholarly output. A total of 89,149 scholarly outputs from 2004 to 2023 were analyzed using statistical and bibliometric methods.

The findings revealed a positive publication growth trend, with 57.74% open access. Gold OA dominates, with 69.61% of papers in 2023. Licensing patterns reveal that 63.75% of OA papers have licenses. Most papers have multiple authors, with 24.83% of over ten authors receiving 60.12% of citations. “Medknow” is the leading publisher, and “The Indian Journal of Ophthalmology” tops journals. Contributions from repositories like SSRN and PubMed are significant. The study also examines citation patterns across different OA types and identifies the top 30 research areas, emphasizing “Medicine” as the most prevalent.

The identified trends and patterns offer valuable insights for policymakers, researchers and organizations to enhance accessibility and impact. This study stresses sustained efforts for transparency and democratization of knowledge in the non-profit sector.

This study filled a gap in existing research by focusing on Indian non-profits, highlighting their roles and impacts often overlooked in scholarly literature. This study provides insights into the growth of open-access publications and their implications in the non-profit sector.

This study aims to study the moderating effects of private ownership and government support on the relationship between outsourcing and product innovation in entrepreneurial ventures in a transition economy.

The data of 10,296 Vietnamese entrepreneurial ventures from the four rounds of the survey conducted by the General Statistics Office (GSO) of Vietnam to investigate the moderating effects of private ownership and government support on the association between outsourcing and entrepreneurial ventures’ product innovation performance. The Probit regression model is employed to estimate such associations.

Our research uncovered that the impact of outsourcing on the likelihood of product innovation is more significant for entrepreneurial operations characterized by a substantial degree of private ownership and government backing as opposed to those without.

The results of our research indicated that the resource-based perspective and extended resource-based view (ERBV) are essential in examining the impact of gaining resources or skills from external sources on the growth of entrepreneurial enterprises. These ideas have significance and importance not just in industrialized economies but also in countries undergoing transition. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial enterprises should have the ability to manage a wide range of resources and make decisions about which activities should be handled internally and which should be delegated to other parties.

Our findings also imply that entrepreneurial ventures should be able to control many resources and choose which tasks should be performed in-house and which should be outsourced to third parties.

By adopting and leveraging the resource-based view (RBV) and extended resource-based views (ERBV), our study developed a theoretical model about private ownership and government support for moderate outsourcing’s impact on entrepreneurial innovation in a transition economy.

PhD graduates are entering an increasing range of careers, but past research has highlighted a lack of preparation for these careers. This study aims to explore the reflections of PhD graduates from science and humanities and social science disciplines regarding support for career development (CD) during their study.

The authors used an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design and collected 136 survey responses and interviewed 21 PhD graduates from two US and one New Zealand universities to investigate their career readiness. Using the lens of Cognitive Information Processing theory, the authors explored the development of self-knowledge and career options-knowledge, and how support at the macro (institutional), meso (departmental) and micro (supervisors) levels influenced CD.

During doctoral study, there was very poor engagement with CD activities. Graduates displayed limited self-knowledge and poor knowledge about career options. Graduates reported drawing mainly on their departments and supervisors for career guidance. Although there were pockets of good practice, some departments were perceived as promoting academia as the only successful outcome, neglecting to support other possible pathways. Some graduates reported excellent supervisor support for CD, but others described disinterest or a damaging response if students said they were not wanting to pursue academia.

The enabling aspects for developing self- and options-knowledge are collated into a conceptual model, which identifies key factors at institutional, departmental and supervisor levels, as well as for PhD students themselves.