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Purpose This paper aims to investigate the effect of total and each individual component of environmental, social and governance score (ESG) on financial performance (FP) of healthcare companies. Design/methodology/approach Data for 468 health-care firms for the business year 2020 is sourced from Thomson Reuters to obtain ESG data. Correlation and multivariate regression analysis are done to investigate the relation between ESG activities and firm performance. The analysis has been done on overall data and subsample data to examine the relation across developing vs developed markets. Findings The results of the study suggest that relation between ESG score and FP cannot be generalized. The results show that performing ESG activities positively impact firm performance of healthcare companies in developed economies; however, this relationship would be negative or insignificant in the case of developing economies. Practical implications The results of this study have implications for both practitioners and policymakers. The authors suggest the specific setups in which the relationship between ESG activities and firm performance will be negative or insignificant. These results are beneficial to policymakers who seek to increase the active participation of firms in ESG activities. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore the relationship of ESG score on FP through the lens of country-level development variables for health-care sector companies.

This paper aims to understand the relation between contemporaneous stock market returns and investor sentiments in Indian context. The analysis is done for daily data over a range of five years. Market measure proxies of investor sentiments including the market mood index and the volatility index are examined to explore their nature of association with the stock market returns. The results show that changes in sentiments have a higher explanatory power than sentiments at level when determining statistically significant relation with stock market returns. While the market mood index indicating optimism is positively related with stock returns, the VIX index also referred to as the fear guard index has a negative relation with stock returns. Moreover the market mood index seems to granger cause stock market returns and exhibit a long run association with stock market returns. With presence of sentiments impacting stock market returns established, more studies in context of developing countries are needed to understand the temporal dynamics between sentiments and stock markets. Contribution/ OriginalityThe current study examines the relationship between daily Indian contemporaneous stock market returns and investor sentiments over a time frame of five years. It had used two indices named market mood index and volatility index as proxies of investor sentiments to represent both optimism and fear in the market.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of Indian investor sentiments on contemporaneous stock returns of Bombay Stock Exchange, National Stock Exchange and various sectoral indices in India by developing a sentiment index. Design/methodology/approach The study uses principal component analysis to develop a sentiment index as a proxy for Indian stock market sentiments over a time frame from April 1996 to January 2017. It uses an exploratory approach to identify relevant proxies in building a sentiment index using indirect market measures and macro variables of Indian and US markets. Findings The study finds that there is a significant positive correlation between the sentiment index and stock index returns. Sectors which are more dependent on institutional fund flows show a significant impact of the change in sentiments on their respective sectoral indices. Research limitations/implications The study has used data at a monthly frequency. Analysing higher frequency data can explain short-term temporal dynamics between sentiments and returns better. Further studies can be done to explore whether sentiments can be used to predict stock returns. Practical implications The results imply that one can develop profitable trading strategies by investing in sectors like metals and capital goods, which are more susceptible to generate positive returns when the sentiment index is high. Originality/value The study supplements the existing literature on the impact of investor sentiments on contemporaneous stock returns in the context of a developing market. It identifies relevant proxies of investor sentiments for the Indian stock market.

Being a key element in logistics distribution, vehicle routing problem becomes an importance research topic in management and computation science. Vehicle routing problem (VRP) with time windows is a specialisation of VRP. In this paper, a brief description of VRP is presented. A mixed integer programming (MIP) is utilised to solve the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). A novel mathematical model of MIP is formulated and implemented using IBM CPLEX. A novel constraint is designed to optimise the number of vehicle used. The proposed model is used to optimise both transportation cost and number of vehicle used simultaneously. The proposed model is tested on two well-known instances of Solomon's benchmark test problem. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed formulation provides promising solutions in reasonable computation time. The sensitivity analysis of customer nodes is also studied.