Business Analyst Journal

From bygone times, people have been postulating that optimism plays an imperative role in the success of a human being. Martin Seligman, the renowned Psychologist and Educator also emphasised on the theory of learned optimism. The fruits of optimistic thinking cannot be certainly denied, when one reads his decades of work on positive psychology. However, there is an existing intriguing yet contradictory theory on Optimism which makes it even more interesting and significant to read Tomas Chamorro work on Confidence and Competence.

The idea behind a bad bank is to clean the balance sheets of the banks and financial institutions of an economy. Currently, the Indian economy is under a lot of pressure because of increasing NPAs in the banking sector particularly from the time when RBI started conducting asset quality review of the banks to get a clearer picture of the situation and this problem is going to escalate further because of the surge in COVID 19 cases and lockdowns due to the pandemic. This pandemic hits the Indian economy very hard, leading to a fall in growth rate, increasing unemployment, and providing uncertainty to all the sectors of the economy. Amidst this pandemic, the government proposed to setup a 'Bad Bank' in Union Budget 2021-22 to handle the stress in the banking sector of our economy. This study explores the idea of a bad bank in the Indian economy and analyse the positive and negative implications of it and this paper also attempts to understand the evolution of the regulations related to ARCs and see the performance of the present ARCs in India by looking into its shareholding pattern, size of non performing assets (NPAs) acquisition, recoveries in comparison with other resolution options, etc. the study revealed that the acquisition and the rate of recoveries of ARCs are growing but it is not sufficient to handle the entire NPAs crisis.

The study of citizenship is not only topical but also a large, variegated, everchanging subject. The truth in this regard is that there is no consensus on the idea of citizenship in terms of rights and duties, feelings, status, identities, etc. and for large numbers of people throughout the world the idea of citizenship is still hollow and empty and meaningless, deprived as they are of virtually all of its amenities (Heater, 2002). In this milieu, it is very heartening that the Centre for Civil Society as an NGO involved in bringing about social change through public policy, has taken initiative to bring out this study that gives the reader the empirical flavour about amenities to the Delhi citizens.

In present scenario, marketers are interested to know more about consumers' purchase intention in order to increase their sales volume and market share. Purchase intention is related to the behaviour, perception and attitude of consumers. The information pertaining to consumers' purchase intention can be important in marketing decision making. The present study examines factors influencing purchase intention of consumers for toiletries products. The data has been collected from 500 respondents (sample size) of Haryana (universe of the study). The data, thus generated, has been analyzed with the help of Factor Analysis and ANOVA(one way).The results revealed that commendation, assessment, advertisement, and familiarity with the brand are main factors influencing the purchase intention of consumers for toiletries products. No significant difference, except one, has been observed in these factors across demographic variables (age, gender, education, occupation, marital status, residential status, and income).

The global economy is passing through the worst economic crisis of modern times since the beginning of 2020 due to the outbreak of an unprecedented pandemic resulting from the spread of novel Corona or Covid-19 virus. The abruptness with which this pandemic erupted and the fast pace at which its disruptive and disastrous impact spread across more than 220 countries of the world makes it a serious area of concern. The emerging challenges are even more daunting in the case of Indian economy owing to the huge population base, high population density and grossly deficient health infrastructure in India. It is against this backdrop that the present paper goes deeper into the important lessons that can be learnt from the unprecedented pandemic and analyses them from the perspective of an economist. In particular, the significance of contingency planning, building-up of reserve capacity, overcoming institutional rigidities and infrastructural bottlenecks, gradualism and cautious optimism are brought to the fore. Besides, issues relating to the demandside as well as supply-side management of an economy as also resource mobilisation for effectively tackling the pandemic are also discussed. The whole discussion provides useful insights for public policy-making that can be reasonably expected to go a long way in improving the policy environment in the times to come.

The Cournot-Bertrand model of oligopoly was introduced in the 1970s. It involved some firms being price setters while other firms were output setters. However there remained a question about the identity of the entity which changed the prices of the output setting firms. An alternative formulation of this problem is set out where in an industry there is a price leader and a price follower. But the price follower is a Stackelberg leader. The price follower tries to estimate the reaction function of the price leader through an iterative learning process and incorporate the former into its profit maximisation exercise. Thereby the price follower tries to factor in the consequences of changes in its output on the price it receives. The equilibrium, local stability and analogy of the model with respect to the Cournot-Bertrand model of oligopoly are examined. Such a set-up is compatible with constant returns to scale of the production process of the price follower.