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Although multiple effective vaccines against the COVID-19 pandemic have been discovered, produced and deployed worldwide at exceptional rates, multiple countries have been left out due to numerous reasons, and the vaccination rates among these countries have been dismally low, while at the other end, some nations were able to inoculate almost all of their people. There have been studies concerning this issue, trying to understand the factors causing such inequity, and most of them look at socio-economic conditions like income and the behavioural factor of vaccine acceptance. This chapter, however, emphasises the role of trade and the global value chains (GVCs) in providing countries access to vaccines, which are being manufactured in a distributed system of production stages. The main concerned variables are vaccination rates and the GVC participation measure. Such analysis could help us understand whether being part of the production chain gives the countries an advantage in accessing the vaccine stocks, and the results suggest that the GVC participation rate does have an effect on the vaccination rate of a country.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the linkages between exchange rate and interest rate in India using quarterly data from Q1 of 1996 to Q4 of 2014.

Stationarity properties of data are checked using the Augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF), Dickey–Fuller test with GLS de-trending (DF-GLS) and Kwiatkowski-Phillips-Schmidt-Shin (KPSS) tests and Perron’s unit root test with structural breaks. Johansen Juselius and Gregory Hansen tests are applied to assess cointegration, and block exogeneity test is used to detect causality among variables.

The study finds long-run relationship among interest rate, rupee–dollar exchange rate, capital flows, intervention, inflation differential, money supply differentials, output differentials and trade-balance differentials. However, the interest rate does not explain movements in the exchange rate, directly and indirectly, via capital flows. Intervention by the Central Banks to stabilize exchange rate does not have implications for movements in interest rate.

The study finds capital flows to be insensitive with respect to interest rates and hence thwarts International Monetary Fund ’s (IMF) claim of using interest rates as a tool to stabilize exchange rate. The much-debated conflict between exchange-rate stabilization and control over interest rates also does not hold up to the empirical reality of India.

The study augments the existing literature by taking into account the problem of structural break in the relationship between interest rate and exchange rate. Three measures of interest rate are used to assess the robustness of results adding to their credibility compared to previous studies.

Cause‐related marketing activities are increasingly becoming a meaningful part of corporate marketing plans. This paper aims to examine the relationship between the company, cause and customer, and how fit between these three groups influences consumer response via generating a positive attitude toward the company‐cause alliance and purchase intent for the sponsored product.

Two studies are carried out, first among students and second among consumers.

Two studies (study 1=232 students, study 2=531 consumers) demonstrate that company‐cause fit improves attitude toward the company‐cause alliance and increases purchase intent. Additionally, this effect is enhanced under conditions of customer‐company and customer‐cause congruence, and the consumer's overall attitude toward the sponsoring company. Skepticism about the company's motivation for participating in a cause‐related marketing initiative was not relevant to consumer purchase decisions.

Results from these studies suggest that consumers may in fact make two different assessments of the sponsoring company in a cause‐related marketing campaign. One assessment may be more cognitive where the consumer compares his or her own identity to that of the company: “Is this company like me? Are our identities alike?” The second assessment is more affective or emotional: “Do I like this company? Do I feel positively about this company?” The strength of the consumer sample suggests that when building a cause‐related marketing program, marketing managers should select a cause that makes sense to the consumer to be a partner in the alliance, build a general positive feeling toward their brand, and limit any self‐serving promotion of the cause‐related marketing alliance to the target consumer population.

The paper provides useful information on the relationship between the company, cause and customer, and how the fit between these three groups influences consumer response.

Over the period, the role of finance has emerged significant in the socio-economic development of the women. There are two major types of finances, i.e. formal and informal ones. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate first the determinants of the demand for credit and then the demand for these credit sources by women especially in urban slums.

In this study, a primary survey was conducted with the help of a structured questionnaire in slums of two major urban cities in India, i.e. Delhi and Mumbai. In total, 450 individuals were interviewed in each city.

This paper presents a range of significant socio-economic factors affecting the demand for credit and source of credit by women borrower in Delhi and Mumbai. Despite, the greater emphasis by the government to increase the formal credit utilization, the informal credit is still preferred.

The outcomes of the study are expectedly useful to various policymakers and banks in encouraging women to opt more for the formal credit. The government can follow the research outcomes to scale up the programmes and schemes targeted for women empowerment in urban slums.

The study is unique of its kind in doing a comparative analysis in slums of two differently located urban cities with large slum population.

The purpose of this paper is to examine industry herding among the institutional investors and to find whether their herding behaviour is intentional or unintentional.

The study uses Lakonishok et al. (1992) model to examine the presence of industry herding behaviour among institutional investors. To determine whether the herding observed is intentional or unintentional, herding measure is regressed with volatility, volume, beta and return. The period of the study is from 1 April 2005-31 March 2015.

The findings of the study showed that though institutional investors have herding tendency towards most of the industries, in the overall period industry herding was not significant. The herding found in some industrial sectors was linked to economic performance of those sectors in India during the period of study and hence the herding was unintentional in nature.

This is the first attempt to study industry herding among institutional investors and their intent in Indian market ever since the country opened its market to foreign investors in a big way. Present study is limited to the use of only bulk/block data instead of the entire trading data for the period.

This study is the first attempt to investigate industry herding behaviour of institutional investors in the market using their bulk and block trading data. The herding observed in well performing industries has been shown to be unintentional and hence rational. The results indicate that the entry of big institutional investors, including foreign institutions into the Indian market has not destabilised the market by irrational herding.