The impact of the U.S. macroeconomic variables on the CBOE VIX Index

The purpose of this study is to find the influence of various macroeconomic factors on the volatility index, as macroeconomic factors affect stock market volatility, resulting in an impact on the VIX Index, representing the risk in the stock market. To estimate the significance and importance of the U.S. macroeconomic variables on stock market volatility and risk, classification problems from machine learning are constructed to predict the daily and weekly trends of the VIX Index. Data from May 2007 to December 2021 is considered for analysis. The selected models are trained with twenty-four daily features and twenty-four plus nine weekly features. The outcomes suggest that the decisions made by the Light GBM and XG Boost on ranking features can be significantly accepted over logistic regression. It is found from the results that economic policy uncertainty indices, gold price, the USD Index, and crude oil are signified as strong predictors. The Financial Stress Index, initial claims, M2, TED spread, Fed rate, and credit spread are also strong predictors, while various yields on fixed income securities make a little less impact on the VIX Index. The TED spread, Financial Stress Index, and Equity Market Volatility (Infectious Disease Tracker) are positively associated with the VIX

EMPIRICAL STUDY: LEADERSHIP, ORGANIZATION CULTURE, EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT ADOPTION: Received: 10th May 2023; Revised: 26th September 2023, 25th October 2023; Accepted: 01st November 2023

Continuous Improvements (CI) is well-known for its significance in driving and facilitating process and products improvements in organizations. For decades, large organizations used CI to improve and streamline process and workforce. CI thinking and adoption is critical for IT functions to improve aspects such as innovation, team productivity, service reliability, and cost optimization. The role of organization culture, leadership, employee engagement become key for adoption of CI to ensure stability, scalability, and sustainability to business functions through right tools, technologies, and services. There is need for research on the influence of trio on adoption of CI in the context of IT. The trio are interrelated components that play a crucial role in the success and sustainability of any organization. The aim of this study is to evaluate these three factors, its influence on adoption of CI by IT function using a quantitative approach. This study engages IT stakeholders from ITES, global companies which have their global IT development centres in India to ascertain their views. The finding of the study shows organization culture has a strong influence on adoption of CI in IT. This study can provide critical insights to management in streamlining IT practice, design organization mechanisms for better adoption of CI in IT