Professional Women, Good Families: Respectable Femininity and the Cultural Politics of a “New” India

This study of professional software women in urban India examines practices of respectable femininity and discourses of the Indian family to understand the changing and abiding aspects of a seemingly new national culture. Colonial and nationalist constructs of the Indian home, and the middle-class women who protected that home, continue to powerfully shape everyday articulations of national belonging, even as they are transformed through individual negotiations and a global economy. Drawing from extensive interviews and ethnographic work, this paper analyzes the interplay of gender, class, and nation in contemporary urban India as individualized, gendered efforts to accumulate symbolic capital.

Infiuence functions for certain parameters in discriminant analysis when a single discriminant function is not adequate

The influence function introduced by Hampel (1968, 1973, 1974) i s a tool that can be used for outlier detection. Campbell (1978) has derived influence function for ~ahalanobis's distance between two populations which can be used for detecting outliers i n discriminant analysis. Radhakrishnan and Kshirsagar (1981) have obtained influence functions for a variety of parametric functions i n multivariate analysis. Radhakrishnan (1983) obtained influence functions for parameters corresponding to "residual" wilks's A and i t s "direction" and "collinearity" factors i n discriminant analysis when a single discriminant function is ade- quate while discriminating among several groups. In this paper influence functions for parameters that correspond to "residual" wilks's A and its "direction" and "coplanarity" factors used to test the goodness of f i t of s (s>l) assigned discriminant func- tions for discriminating among several groups are obtained. These influence functions can be used for outlier detection i n m u l t i -variate data when a single discriminant function is not adequate.     

A process-oriented perspective on differential business value creation by information technology: An empirical investigation

The relationship between information technology investments and firm value as an area of inquiry has sustained interest among IS researchers over the past decade. More recently, some have challenged the notion differential value among firms through Information Technology (IT) as it evolves into a ubiquitous utility-like set of technologies. This study examines the relationship between IT and business value from a process-oriented perspective, and also helps to identify the underlying links between IT and its differential business value to firms. By drawing upon economic and organizational theories, this paper develops a process framework to assess the intermediate organizational process capabilities and overall performance of firms that effectively deploy and use IT. Using data from over 80 firms, the study finds empirical support for the differential business value created by IT along a number of process oriented dimensions. These findings are discussed as these results set an optimistic tone for IT as a major causal driver of differentiation.     

Empowered Women,Failed Patriarchs: Neoliberalism and Global Gender Anxieties

Notions of “empowered women,” promoted by NGOs, economists, and feminists beginning in the 1970s, do not necessitate a countervailing notion of “failed patriarchs.” However, our review of the feminist literatures on globalization, development, and migration in the United States, the former Soviet Union, and South Asia suggests that discourses of empowered women and failed patriarchs are fused in the specter of the “reverse gender order.” A presumption of this new order is that global capitalism has liberated women to such an extent that they have surpassed men who are now the truly “disadvantaged.” Drawing on these literatures as evidence, we argue that the large‐scale incorporation of poor and working‐class women into global capitalism relies upon an ideology of the family that keeps women's labor “cheap” and draws support from the feminist idea that work is empowering for women. Diverse nationalisms uphold the ideology of the family as central to capitalist expansion, providing culturally resonant justifications for women's unpaid reproductive work, while men are breadwinners. Thus, poor and working‐class men experience a painful dissonance between breadwinning expectations and economic opportunities. We show that these tensions between ideologies and material conditions make women's responsibility for reproductive work a structural feature of neoliberalism.     

Customers’ Capital Market Information Quality and Suppliers’ Performance

We empirically examine the association between downstream firms’, i.e., customers’ capital market information quality, and the operating performance of upstream firms, i.e., suppliers. Customers’ capital market information quality is measured by the customers’ provision of earnings forecasts, the customers’ reported earnings quality, and the customers’ coverage by financial analysts and credit rating agencies. We hypothesize and find a positive association between customers’ capital market information quality and suppliers’ operating performance measured by the DuPont profitability ratios. The association is stronger for suppliers with higher sales volatility, no order backlogs, customers who are less dependent on their input, and shorter business relation with customers. Collectively, the results suggest that the quality of information provided by the customers to the capital market has a spillover effect in the input market, i.e., helps the suppliers improve their performance.     

Statistical issues in studying the relative importance of body mass index,waist circumference,waist hip ratio and waist stature ratio to predict type 2 diabetes

Systematic and appropriate statistical analysis is needed to examine the relative performance of anthropometrical indices, viz. body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), waist hip ratio (WHR) and waist stature ratio (WSR) for predicting type 2 diabetes. Using information on socio-demographic, anthropometric and biochemical variables from 2148 males, we examined collinearity and non-linearity among the predictors before studying the association between anthropometric indices and type 2 diabetes. The variable involving in collinearity was removed from further analysis, and the relative importance of BMI, WC and WHR was examined by logistic regression analysis. To avoid non-interpretable odds ratios (ORs), cut point theory is used. Optimal cut points are derived and tested for significance. Multivariable fractional polynomial (MFP) algorithm is applied to reconcile non-linearity. As expected, WSR and WC were collinear with WHR and BMI. Since WSR was jointly as well as independently collinear, it was dropped from further analysis. The OR for WHR could not be interpreted meaningfully. Cut point theory was adopted. Deciles emerged as the optimal cut point. MFP recognized non-linearity effects on the outcome. Multicollinearity among the anthropometric indices was examined. Optimal cut points were identified and used to study the relative ORs. On the basis of the results of analysis, MFP is recommended to accommodate non-linearity among the predictors. WHR is relatively more important and significant than WC and BMI.     

Multivariate analysis of variance with additional data from an unknown subset of the populations

In this paper we consider the problem of testing the means of k multivariate normal populations with additional data from an unknown subset of the k populations. The purpose of this research is to offer test procedures utilizing all the available data for the multivariate analysis of variance problem because the additional data may contain valuable information about the parameters of the k populations. The standard procedure uses only the data from identified populations. We provide a test using all available data based upon Hotelling' s generalized T²statistic. The power of this test is computed using Betz's approximation of Hotelling' s generalized T²statistic by an F-distribution. A comparison of the power of the test and the standard test procedure is also given.     

Is stock price a good measure for assessing value-relevance of earnings? An empirical test

Recently, a growing body of literature has created a widespread impression that financial statements have lost their value-relevance because of a shift from traditional capital-intensive economy into a high technology, service-oriented economy. In particular, the claim is that financial statements are less relevant in assessing the fundamental value of high technology, service-oriented firms/activities, which are by nature knowledge-intensive. These conclusions are based on past studies that examine the association between accounting numbers (i.e., earnings and book values) and stock prices and show that, in general, the association between accounting information and stock prices has been declining, over time. These findings have been interpreted to be the result of a decline in value relevance of accounting. We examine the predictive content of stock prices and accounting information, as against the contemporaneous association between accounting information and stock prices. We find that while both the predictive content of earnings and prices declined over time, the predictive content of price signals declined by even more. Our analysis suggests that the declining association could be the consequence of increased noise in stock prices over time resulting from increases in trading volume driven by non-information based trades, and not just a decline in the predictive content of earnings. More importantly, this conclusion is consistent with the insights of the noisy rational expectations equilibrium framework analysis, i.e. that increased noise has caused the predictive content of prices to degrade over time. Overall, our evidence suggests that stock prices may not be an appropriate benchmark for gauging the information content of accounting earnings.

A likelihood ratio test for interaction among variances

A likelihood ratio test for interaction in an analysis of variance model, when observations are variances is considered. Another statistic based on the logarithmic transformation is also considered and the null and non-null distributions of the test statistics are considered.     

EStimating mahalanobis's distance using bayesian analysis

In this paper we are concerned with the problem of estimating Mahalanobis's distance between two or more populations using Bayesian approach. We first consider the case of two independent univariate normal populations having a common variance. We derive the posterior distribution of the