Journal Press India^®

I am pleased to share the latest issue of MUDRA: Journal of Finance and Accounting with our readers. This issue of the journal includes interesting studies in diverse areas of finance and accounting as well as related areas including subsidies distribution, risk-return behavior from share buybacks and portfolios, role of auditors in corporate governance, and analysis of the stock split trading volumes and the nexus between foreign institutional investors and stock market. The issue also presents a review article on factors affecting women entrepreneurs and a case study on financial performance of a firm.

The empirical study on ‘Constraints of farm mechanization and subsidies distribution in the agriculture sector of Bihar’ by Santosh Kumar and Md. Alamgir analyze the constraints to farm mechanization and the farm equipment subsidies program in Bihar's agriculture sector and provides suggestions to policymakers for an effective distribution management system. Madhu Bala, in her paper, examines the trend of short-term returns generated by buyback offers in India using the sample of 589 firms for a period of 1999 to 2021. The study found that there are irregular trends of short-term returns which have been created through buyback events. The corporate sector is seen to be moving from the Stock Exchange Method of buyback to the Tender Method, along with encouraging shareholders’ response rate to buyback offers.

Vanita Chandavar, Komal Gadade and Sagar Patil, attempt to construct a portfolio of BSE 30 firms and perform the risk-return analysis of the constructed portfolio by using the data for a period of 2017-2022. The study deploys Sharpe, Treynor and Jensen performance measures and ranks the portfolios. The study concludes that when volatility is <0.5, there is no significant impact of volatility on portfolio performance whereas the portfolio with volatility more than one has reported significant impact of volatility on its performance. The Nexus between Foreign Institutional Investors and NSE is assessed by Abhimanyu Jain, Himanshu Goel, Sakshi Jain and Yukta Sharma during the Covid time. Their study applies standard time series analysis methodology to assess the causality between the FIIs and NIFTY index and conclude no relationship between the two during the Covid time.

Another empirical study by Jyoti Pandey assesses the changes in the trading volume of 65 firms listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange after the announcement of stock split during 2008 to 2021. The study finds that the stock splits enhance post-split liquidity for the vast majority of sample businesses in the month after the split. The sectoral behavior of the same is also assessed and reported in this study.

In the paper ‘Knowledge of external auditor with reference to corporate governance’ by Yagna Pankaj Vyas, Priyanshi Jariwala and Kinjal Mistry, the authors investigate the knowledge of external auditors about corporate governance by considering the audit report, audit size, audit hours and audit fees as determinants. The study also explores the role of demographic factors on this relationship and finds that there is no relationship between gender and experience with the knowledge of corporate governance.

This issue has a review paper by Nupur and V. Shunmugasundaram that conducts systematic review of literature on the topic ‘factors affecting the women entrepreneurs’ using the PRISMA framework for the literature published between 2012 and 2022 and provides in-depth analysis of the existing research published in the discipline. Yogita Patil and Chandrashekhar Deore conduct a case study to examine the performance ratios and sustainability of Samsung Electronics. This concludes the present issue of the journal.

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