My research focuses on emerging markets, with a particular interest in strategy and policy questions that have implications for firm performance. The global microfinance industry, with a unique business model aimed at improving access to finance for people at the base of the pyramid, has been widely documented as being impressive in terms of loan repayment rates.

This is often attributed to its unique business model that despite not involving any asset as collateral can ensure a high likelihood of loan repayment by taking advantage of the high social capital that poor people often have within their communities. What is less well documented is that lending organisations’ over-reliance on a community’s social capital could pose a serious risk: if some borrowers decide to default on their repayments, this loan default behaviour is likely to diffuse rapidly through the tightly-knit social networks.

My research empirically examines this possibility by examining how two negative policy shocks affected the microfinance organisations in India:

1. An unexpected crisis in 2010 in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, when a string of farmer suicides led the regional policymaker to take unexpected and very stern actions that proved bad for the business and viability of microfinance institutions;
2. An unexpected drop in liquidity in the Indian economy in end-2016, when the government implemented the 2016 demonetisation policy that led to a cash crunch wherein people suddenly had a lot less valid cash from which to make repayments.

Another project in the research stream focusing on strategy in emerging markets seeks to understand (a) why some firms gain while others lose market share in the wake of a sudden increase in global demand, and (b) how subnational heterogeneity by geography may influence this competitive dynamic.

This research project seeks to investigate whether the differential opportunity cost of firms is an important mechanism that may provide an answer to these questions.

Leveraging the 2009-10 H1N1 influenza pandemic as a source of exogenous increase in global demand for influenza vaccines, the project investigates how subnational heterogeneity in economic resources, industry infrastructure, and political alignment may differently affect the performance of incumbent MNEs and rival domestic firms following the pandemic.

This research project aims to provide evidence-based insights on the interplay between subnational heterogeneity and firm behaviour in the wake of a global pandemic. The findings are likely to have important implications for a contemporary problem at the business-societal interface.