Recent regulatory changes in India require the firms to improve the appointment of female directors on corporate boards, and it is believed that such a regulation would prove to be a boon in terms of strategic decision making. The Board Capital Theory advocates that the appointment of women directors on board shall enhance various dimensions of the board capital breadth and help in better decision making. With growing consciousness for sustainable practices throughout the globe, it is pertinent to see whether the gender diverse boards can promote corporate social responsibility and create a business case for their upsurge, as it would give room for policy implications. This study investigates the impact of gender diverse boards on promoting corporate social responsibility, using multivariate regression with a sample of NIFTY 50 Index for the period 2014-2019. The study found insignificant positive relation among gender-diverse boards and sustainability. To check for the robustness of the study, we have used two diversity indices, Blau & Shannon index, to supplement our results.

The objective of this paper is to study whether the presence of women on boards affects the financial performance of firms. This study builds upon other studies that have earlier tried to determine the impact of number of women directors in Indian corporates on their financial performances, in terms of market performance index, i.e. Tobin's Q. The new Companies Act, 2013 has mandated the appointment of at least one woman director in certain classes of listed companies in India as described in Section 149(1)(b), which could possibly bring about a change in the governance and thus the financial performance of firms. The focus of this study is on finding and analysing the impact of compliance with this provision on the financial performance of IPO firms. In order to test our hypotheses, we selected 41 Indian Companies that have made an Initial Public Offer (IPO) in the recent past and have been listed on Bombay Stock Exchange during the period 2012-2016. The performance of each of these firms has been measured in terms of Tobin's Q for 3 successive years after their listing (IPO) as well as by using two gender diversity index values-Blau Index and Shannon index. The study concluded that the proportion of women on board is insignificant and that it could not impact the financial performance of the firms. Neither has it caused any adverse impact on the performance of these firms.

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The present study contributes to literature by investigating the impact of corporate governance practices on earnings management. To achieve the objectives of this study, we analysed a sample of 50 large capitalization companies from 10 different sectors viz. automotive, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, cement/construction, chemical, real estate/ retail, food and beverage, technology, engineering and metals and mining listed on BSE for the period 2005–06 to 2015–16. Corporate governance has been quantified through its different attributes, i.e., board size, board committee meeting frequency, board independence, role duality (CEO/chairman), audit committee meeting frequency and audit committee independence. Earnings management is measured by discretionary accruals calculated using modified Jones model developed by Dechow, Sloan and Sweeney (1995). Empirical findings of overall analysis reveal that board size and earnings management are negatively associated whereas board meeting frequency is positively associated with earnings management. In the sector-wise analysis, impact of corporate governance in constraining earnings management was found to be relatively higher and consistent in Oil and Gas sector and Technology sector as compared to other sectors. The findings of the study have important policy implications as they encourage adopting corporate governance practices in firms in order to mitigate earnings management.

A theoretical method based on maximum Shannon entropy framework (MSEF) in the presence of the geometric/ or shifted fractional geometric mean of the queue size is applied to study the finite buffer system. Analytical expression of the loss probability for large buffer size is found to depict power law behavior. The maximum entropy framework is extended to incorporate additional shifted fractional arithmetic mean constraint to yield the expression of loss probability which is similar to the one derived by Kim and Shroff [1] who have employed an entirely different approach based on maximum variance asymptotic (MVA) approximation. An important finding is the relationship between fractional order and the Hurst parameter. The advantage of MSEF is that it has enabled to derive the analytical closed form generalized expression of the probability distribution of queue size in finite buffer system. Further, MSEF with shifted fractional geometric mean constraint gives the same distribution of queue size as the one obtained by maximizing Tsallis entropy subject to the fractional arithmetic mean of queue size.Index Terms-Maximum entropy principle, Shannon entropy, finite buffer system, power law behavior, loss probability