Journal Press India^®

I am pleased to share the latest issue of MUDRA: Journal of Finance and Accounting. This issue comprises review based and empirical articles covering contemporary research themes related to finance and accounting disciplines. The issue also includes a case study on a relevant and much needed issue related to NPAs in banks. The different themes covered in the current issue include behavioural finance, costing and profitability analysis, mergers and acquisitions, and capital market predictions.

The issue covers two articles related to investment decision-making process under different demographic and rationality conditions for the end investors. The research article titled ‘Moderating effect of demographic traits on the influence of investment decisions on the financial behaviour of working women’ by Ritika Maurya and V. Shunmugasundaram assesses the role of the demographic profile of working women investors and finds a significant impact of the demographics on the financial decision-making process in India. The paper on ‘Economic resilience and rationality: A study of Indian stock investors’ investment decisions and performance’ by Arjun Hans and Farah Choudhary, attempts to assess the investment decision making process under economic resilience and rationality conditions. The study concludes that there is a positive relationship between panic selling and performance. This shows that during market crashes, investors feel fearful and indulge in panic selling, which further results is falling prices and poor performance.

The paper by Harish V. B. and Sadyojathappa S. analyses the impact of target costing on profitability of selected automobile companies in India and finds a significant negative relationship between the target costing technique and the profitability of automobile companies. Tejesh H. R. and Jeelan Basha V. forecast the two benchmark indices of Indian economy using the standard ARIMA and GARCH frameworks, in their paper. An analysis of post-merger operating performance of acquiring firms in India has been conducted in the paper by R. L. Hyderabad. The study finds that mergers do well only in their first year and in subsequent years, the operating performance falls and even the control-adjusted performance declines.

Basu Garg, in his paper on ‘An evaluation of e-learning process during Covid-19 lockdown in government colleges of Himachal Pradesh’ examines the effectiveness of e-learning processes being adopted in government colleges of Himachal Pradesh during Covid-19 lockdown. The study also presents the reasons for and against the adoption of online classes and the problems faced by college students while attending online classes.

Shivani Shivhare and V. Shunmugasundaram conduct an in-depth systematic literature review for start-up success in their paper ‘Does business models matter for start-up success? A systematic literature review using the PRISMA model’ and highlight that there is lack of adequate academic publications on BMs in start-ups.

This issue also includes a case study of State Bank of India in the context of evaluating the impact of NPA provisioning on the net worth of public sector banks. This case study by Vinod Kumar Adwani and Mahendra Vishwakarma provides an in-depth analysis of the relationship between NPA provisions and the net worth of State Bank of India and concludes that there is a substantial impact of increasing NPA provision on the shareholder’s net worth of SBI.

We hope this issue of MUDRA is illuminating and insightful for our readers and motivates potential authors to make more unique, diverse, and topical contributions to the journal.

Dr. Prashant Sharma

Editor-in-Chief