I am very happy to bring forth the third edition of our journal Decision in 2019. The issue III of Volume 46 brings together different spectra of research articles in accordance with our journal objective, and we have a portfolio of research articles and case studies. This is coming just after the special issue in June which focussed on Changing nature of Work, a very relevant issue in modern time. This September issue also touches upon issues mainly from firm’s and market’s perspectives. The empirical papers deal with cutting-edge methodologies, and the case studies nurture the possibility of renewable energy in power sector in Africa, a very crucial ingredient in today’s managerial decision-making process.

The first article “Influence of celebrity factors, consumer attitude and involvement on shoppers’ purchase intention using hierarchical regression” by C. Prasad et al. throws some light on marketing strategy. The study indicates that celebrity attractiveness, consumers’ attitude towards advertisement and attitude towards brand have a significant positive influence on consumers’ purchase intention. Their research also contradicted some of the earlier observations and found the insignificant impact of celebrity congruence and consumer involvement on purchase intention.

The next four articles deal with empirical finance. These articles analyse firm’s performances and market reaction with respect to corporate governance mechanism and market volatility using econometric methodologies such as GARCH model and quantile regression. The second article “Effect of Corporate Governance on Stock Market Liquidity: Empirical Evidence from Indian Companies” by M. Sidhu et al. discusses how to transmit market liquidity through measures of corporate governance. By using dataset on BSE 500 listed companies during the FY 2013 to FY 2017 and using panel data regression model, the study provides evidence of the important role played by Corporate Governance in enhancing stock market liquidity of the company. Such framework of analysis can provide insightful information on drivers to the regulators, investors for injecting capital market liquidity and for the framing of law.

The article on “Does corporate social responsibility lead to superior financial performance? Evidence from BSE 100 index” By S. Maqbool et al. on the other hand uses data on BSE 100 index for the period of 9 years (2010–2018). The panel regression analysis looks at the firm’s profitability and stock market return and observes that corporate social responsibility has positive impact on concurrent profitability and stock returns and has positive impact on future profitability, but not on future stock return.

The fourth article titled “Behavior of volatility persistence in 10-year sovereign bond yields of India and China: evidence from component-GARCH model of Engle and Lee (1999)” by S. Bhat et al. explored an interesting comparison between India and China bond yield’s volatility. Using Engle and Lee’s (1999) C-GARCH model, they have decomposed the volatility of 10-year sovereign bond yields of India and China into permanent and transitory components. Their results reveal that permanent conditional volatility shows long memory with long-run component’s half-life decay ranging from 91 to 97 days for India and China, respectively; the temporary component of volatility is much smaller in magnitude with a very short duration for both countries.

The fifth title also deals with volatility measure by considering VIX (Indian market) and investigates the relationship of this with Nifty50 daily returns and trading volume. Using quantile regression method, they (S. Siddiqui and Preeti Roy) found significant asymmetric relationship of stock returns with changes in volatility and volume distribution. It was found to be stronger at extreme ends of the dependent variable’s distribution. The evidence of leverage effect was also significant for the lagged period. The contemporaneous negative relationship was found between volatility and volume changes highlighting that the investors in Indian markets are risk-averse. But the positive lagged effect of changes in volatility on trading volume supports sequential arrival of information hypothesis and affirmed the presence of noise traders. They conclude by saying that India VIX potentially can be used for portfolio hedging purposes.

The next two articles consider crucial issues in some particular regions but with a much broader scope.

The sixth piece in this issue is a case study on “Sustainable energy solutions: Akon Lighting Africa” by Jashim Ahmed et al., an interesting contribution in current search for renewable energy solution. This case discusses how Akon Lighting Africa, a celebrity-run project, is harnessing solar energy to provide electricity to those who live without it. The case discusses about Akon’s initiative which uses a simple but an effective strategy; it combines the continent’s natural sunshine with innovative technologies and African expertise. In addition to examining the challenges of operating in different countries, the case also explores the possibilities of Akon to exploit its competitive advantages to boost electricity accessibility in Africa.

Last but not the least, the research article on “Education, experience, social network and firm survival: the case of the electrical fittings cluster in Sargodha, Pakistan” by S Ullah et al. has significant implications in the firm survival analysis. Their study clarifies the firm survival issues related to small business economics in Pakistan. They used for this study the electrical fittings data sets, collected from an industrial cluster firms in Sargodha, Pakistan in 2008 and a follow-up survey in 2017. The main contribution of this study is to provide new results that relate to firm survival at the cluster-level in the context of Pakistan and shows the relationships among human capital, social capital and firm survival.

I would also like to acknowledge and thank all the anonymous reviewers who helped the Editorial Board to bring this third issue of 2019.