Home ›› Finance
Insight :: Finance
Bank stocks - does risk management matter?
Do stock markets reward financial institutions, such as banks, for risk-taking or for risk-management? Most economists agree that highly skewed incentives drove financers to undertake risks that pushed the world economy to the brink.
While tighter regulation is being touted as a potential solution, are markets already factoring risk management capability of a bank in its stock price? Professor M. Jayadev and co-author Rudra Sensarma studied the performance of Indian banks in the recent past to answer this question.
Insight :: Finance
Which hedge fund to invest in?
How often have financial advisors shown us a table of high performing mutual funds and got us to write out a check? The answer is likely all too often. Most investors have a difficult time identifying the high performers in the simplest of asset classes. So how will we deal with complex financial instruments such as hedge funds?
Professor U Dinesh Kumar and Professor H Saranga of IIMB along with AB Roy and K Singal studied the performance of more than 4500 hedge funds. They present a framework that helps investors identify hedge fund strategies that are more efficient than others and also evaluate individual hedge funds. Click here to find out how to evaluate hedge funds.
Viewpoint :: Finance
How effective has SEBI been?
Capital markets perform best when governed by a clear set of rules and regulations. This is truer still for developing economies such as India, where the Securities and Exchange Board, India (SEBI) plays the role of the market regulator. Formed in 1992, SEBI has presided over a market that has grown dramatically. How effective has SEBI been as a regulator?
Professor G. Sabarinathan of IIMB has studied the securities regulatory framework in India and the contribution of SEBI in particular. To get an overview of the framework and his conclusions on the role of SEBI click here.
Viewpoint :: Finance
Can rural India get access to financial services?
Newspapers are replete with advertisements from public sector banks proudly proclaiming the number of branches and savings accounts they have opened in far flung districts of rural India. In fact, government authorities present such statistics as success stories for India's initiative for financial inclusion.
Impressive as these achievements and numbers are, do they really provide the real picture? Are rural households really benefiting from the presence of bank branches in their area? How many of them are able to tap into the financial services offered by these branches? Who are the real beneficiaries of financial inclusion across rural India?
Professor Rajalaxmi Kamath and Professor Arnab Mukherji of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and Professor Maria Sandstrom of Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden studied the spread of financial institutions in rural India to answer these and other questions.