The working young in urban India exhibit inferior financial knowledge, inferior financial attitude, and superior financial behavior compared to their counterparts elsewhere. While both men and women require intervention to enhance their financial knowledge, focused intervention is needed to improve the financial attitude of men and the financial behavior of women. Living in a joint family impacts financial literacy negatively and consultative decision-making in families impacts it positively. The influence of these key aspects of Indian family life indicates the need to involve family members in financial literacy programs to improve financial decision making of families.

The main objective of the Working Paper series of IIMA is to help faculty members, research staff, and doctoral students to speedily share their research findings with professional colleagues and to test out their research findings at the pre-publication stage.

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This paper examines the serial independence of shortrun changes in the prices of securities and the stock market mdex to establish the efficiency of the Indian capital markets in assimilating information. Common statistical techniques have been used to test the hypothesis of serial independence of these changes. While the securities showed independence of price changes, the changes in the market index exhibited statistically significant serial dependence. Despite this difference in the behaviour of individual securities and the index it is argued that the Indian capital market is efficient in incorporating information in the price structure of securities.

The term “securities scam” refers to the diversion of funds from the banking system to various stockbrokers in a series Of transactions—primarily government securities—during the period April 1991 to May 1992. An understanding of the scam is a prerequisite for any meaningful analysis of policy alternatives to improve the functioning of the financial system. This paper by Samir K Barua and Jayanth R Varma presents a plausible reconstruction of how the scam originated, how it was perpetrated, and what would be its aftermath.