PUBLIC ENTERPRISES---CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

Public sector occupies a prominent position in the Indian economy. The present government policy is to divest its holding in PSUs, without privatizing profit making PSUs. It has also decided to provide full autonomy to the board of directors of those enterprises. This provides an interesting setting to examine corporate governance issues. This paper examines corporate governance issues in the context of present disinvestment policy of the government.Public Sector Enterprises, State-Owned Enterprises

Economic Value Added --- A General Perspective

This paper explains the concept of Economic Value Added (EVA) that is gaining popularity in India. The paper examines whether EVA is a superior performance measure both for corporate reporting and for internal governance. It relied on empirical studies in U.S.A. and other advance economies. It concluded that though EVA does not provide additional information to investors, it can be adapted as a corporate philosophy for motivating and educating employees to differentiate between value creating and value destructing activities. This would lead to direct all efforts in creating shareholder value. The paper brings to attention the dangerous trend of reporting EVA casually that might mislead investors.Economic Value Added, Corporate Performace

Dissipative dynamics of fission in the framework of asymptotic expansion of Fokker-Planck equation

The dynamics of fission has been formulated by generalising the asymptotic expansion of the Fokker-Planck equation in terms of the strength of the fluctuations where the diffusion coefficients depend on the stochastic variables explicitly. The prescission neutron multiplicities and the mean kinetic energies of the evaporated neutrons have been calculated and compared with the respective experimental data over a wide range of excitation energy and compound nuclear mass. The mean and variance of the total kinetic energies of the fission fragments have been calculated and compared with the experimental values.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in European Physical Journal

Economic Impact of 'Regulation on Corporate Governance': Evidence from India

India, with its 20 million shareholders, is one of the largest emerging markets in terms of the market capitalization. In order to protect the large investor base, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has enforced a regulation effective from April 2001, requiring mandatory disclosure of information and a change in the corporate governance mechanisms of the listed companies. This study empirically examines the economic impact of the Regulation on the stock market variables. The experimental group exhibits significant reduction in their beta consistent to the notion that increased information and better corporate governance mechanism reduces the risk of these companies.Corporate Governance, Financial Disclosure Regulation, Voluntary Disclosure, Risk, Cost of Capital