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To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5957.2008.02103.x Byline: Uday Chandra (1), Nandkumar (Nandu) Nayar (1) Keywords: private debt; asymmetric information; earnings management; information content; mispricing; threshold level monitoring Abstract: Abstract: Private placements of straight nonbank debt by publicly traded firms elicit a positive stock price reaction on average, consistent with a market perception that they confer significant certification and monitoring benefits on borrowers. However, long-run stock returns following the debt issues are significantly lower than benchmarks. Our results are consistent with the view that firms issue private debt prior to a decline in operating performance, and they disclose overly optimistic information in the pre-issue period which prevents information on the upcoming downturn from reaching the market in a timely manner. Lenders have private information on the post-issue performance decline prior to their lending decision, and take steps to protect their investment which do not benefit equity investors. Our results are inconsistent with certification and monitoring benefits accruing to equity investors from private nonbank debt. Author Affiliation: (1)The authors are respectively from the University at Albany - SUNY and Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA. Article History: (Paper received December 2006, revised version accepted June 2008) Article note: (*) Address for correspondence: Uday Chandra, University at Albany - SUNY, Albany, NY 12222, USA. e-mail: uchandra@uamail.albany.edu

In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour control of the lowest orders and, in this roundtable, she calls colonial Madras a 'slave society'. The scholars included here examine that contention and the major subsidiary arguments on which it is based. Uday Chandra identifies The Pariah Problem with a new social history of caste and Dalitness. Brian K. Pennington links the 'religionization' of caste that Viswanath identifies to the contemporary Hindu right's concerns for religious sentiment and authenticity. Lucinda Ramberg takes up Viswanath's account of the constitution of a public that excluded the Dalit to inquire further about the gendered nature of that public and the private realm it simultaneously generated. Zoe Sherinian calls attention to Viswanath's characterization of missionary opposition to social equality for Dalits and examines missionary and Dalit discourses that stand apart from those that Viswanath studied. Joel Lee extends some of Viswanath's claims about the Madras presidency by showing strong parallels to social practices in colonial North India. Finally, Viswanath's own response addresses the assessments of her colleagues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the association between a firm's LIFO reserve and its equity risk. We hypothesize that LIFO reserve has favorable implications for equity risk as it confers tax benefits and represents unhooked profits, which prompt firms to lower their borrowings and effectively increase equity. Consistent with this hypothesis, we document a negative association between LIFO reserve and two measures of risk: standard deviation of stock returns and beta. We document a negative association between LIFO reserve and debt, consistent with the proposition that LIFO reserve ami debt are tar shield substitutes. However, the negative association between LIFO reserve and equity risk remains even when the level of debt of firms is controlled. Further tests show that adjusting the denominator of the debt-equity ratio for LIFO reserve improves its explanatory power with regard to risk, consistent with the notion that LIFO reserve is viewed as a component of equity in assessing risk. Additional tests indicate that LIFO reserve has explanatory power with regard to future risk. Also, variability of LIFO reserve is positively associated with equity risk, suggesting that firms with high temporal variability in their LIFO reserve may be unable to fully avail of the future benefits of LIFO accounting. Collectively, these results indicate that LIFO reserve is negatively associated with equity risk and conveys information that is potentially useful in assessing equity risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Prior research documents a large downward drift in stock prices following issuances of debt and equity by US firms. We conduct tests based on both stock price and trading volume to provide evidence on the reasons for this apparent market anomaly. We document evidence of earnings management through accruals prior to external financing and lower operating performance afterward that is associated with the amount of capital raised. The earnings management that precedes external financing and the amount of capital raised are associated with both the post-financing decline in stock price and trading volume around earnings announcements that follow for a period of three years. This evidence is consistent with the proposition that firms raise external capital prior to predictable declines in their operating performance and they release upward biased earnings before these events to manage investor expectations. The failure of many investors to incorporate this information into their trading decisions in a timely manner consistent with limited attention and over-confidence appears to drive stock mispricing. Our evidence does not support the conjecture that the financing anomaly is primarily a statistical artifact or that it is a manifestation of the accrual anomaly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the association between commercial paper rating downgrades and expectations of the level and variability of future earnings. Our examination shows that such rating downgrades are associated with a significant reduction in analyst forecasts of near-term earnings. We document a tendency by financial analysts at the Value Line Investment Survey to progressively revise their estimates of quarterly earnings downward on average and implement two methods to control for the resulting bias. The reduction in earnings estimates is robust to these controls. In addition, we observe an increase in systematic risk for a subset of firms for which the downgrade implies exit from the commercial paper market. Analysis of stock price changes around the downgrade announcement dates shows that although the information on lower future earnings reflected in mild rating downgrades merely confirms market beliefs, the information on lower level and/or higher variability of future earnings associated with severe downgrades constitutes new information unavailable to the market prior to the rating change announcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following recent debates between Vivek Chibber and leading postcolonial theorists, I probe into what is missing in these exchanges. I focus on the figure of the ‘tribal’ in modern India in Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India and Alpa Shah’s In the Shadows of the State, both of which claim to offer emic perspectives on subaltern politics and history. Yet both works, despite their undeniable differences, display a striking universalism that puts them, paradoxically, in the company of Chibber. This universalism, which we may call the resisting subject, is about the Other and about us simultaneously, the former constituted by the latter as an abstract object of analysis and as a key symbol of intellectual vanguardism. Are we not better off abandoning such universalisms and searching for ways in which Marxist theories of culture can be melded with postcolonial theories of capitalism? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late 2008 a five-minute video clip entitled Gaon Chodab Nahin (literally, “We Shall Not Leave Our Village”) came into circulation among activists and grassroots NGOs in the forest highlands of eastern India. To those who watched and passed on the video throughout the eastern Indian states of Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa, it summed up the plight of adivasi or “tribal” populations in the region as they battled an emerging state–corporate nexus whose plans for rapid industrialization in India relied on greater access to forest and mineral resources. This essay critically interrogates the myriad lives of this video clip through a close study of the real and virtual arenas in which it came to be viewed and engaged by different audiences. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the forest state of Jharkhand in eastern India, I examine how developmental NGOs, indigeneity activists and rural adivasi villagers came to view and interpret this video differently. These different interpretations, I show, simultaneously perpetuate and destabilize established ideas of “primitivism” in postcolonial India, especially when some adivasi subjects talk back to their well-meaning patrons and critique representations of themselves. Might the production of “primitive” subjects be, I ask, paradoxically conjoined to processes of primitive accumulation in postcolonial India? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]