Taking the advantage of eminent scholars’ participation in NISM’s Conference on Securities Markets 2008, NISM organized a one-day workshop on 21^st December 2008 in Mumbai for research scholars and young faculty members planning to take up research in securities markets.

This workshop was designed to introduce new promising research themes and empirical methodologies and to have interaction with eminent scholars in a class room environment. The workshop included five sessions and featured presentations on the following research themes:

More than 50 participants from all over India, (eg: IIM-A, IIM-B, IIT-B, IIT-D, IIT-M, University of Hyderabad, ICFAI, NMIMS, NIRMA, ISB, Goa University, Osmania University etc) participated in the workshop.

The workshop started with Prof. S Viswanathan’s lecture.  His lecture covered the basics of Collateral, Prime broker model and the emergence of vicious circle and need for regulation of such securities.  He illustrated his own theoretical model that proposes trade-off between permanent and temporary effects and subsequently the model proposes a natural linkage between market liquidity and funding liquidity.

The next session was on Liquidity and how it affects asset prices. Prof. Tarun Chordia, author of several scholarly papers in this area, went through an excursion of this research area with summaries on level and risk of liquidity and how one can empirically incorporate Liquidity in asset pricing literature.

Though rich microstructure data is available in India, very few research studies are available. The organizers felt that a thorough exposure on market microstructure research would be of help to workshop participants. Prof. Pradeep Yadav gave a broader picture of Market Microstructure research area and outlined promising research themes to the attendees. His lecture exposed a rich literature and would serve as basic references for those who would like to start of microstructure research.

Prof. Krishnamurthy Subramanian introduced emerging research area in Corporate Finance, namely: Laws, Institutions and Corporate Finance. The literature on Law and Finance is directly relevant to India and other emerging countries and truly international in its perspective. He gave an overview of legal origin’s influence on corporate finance outcomes of institutions. His session, further, sensitized on challenges the researchers need to face in cross-country empirical works. Prof. Subramanian went through one of his recent works (Bankruptcy Codes and Innovation, Review of Financial Studies, 2009) and illustrated how he handled cross-country empirical work.

The last session of the workshop is on Introduction of Network for Securities Market Data by Prof. Vijaya Bhaskar Marisetty. Prof. Vijay started with stressing the importance of having a quality and accurate database to get top class journals and discussed about emergence of NSMD. The NSMD contains several unique databases like Corporate Governance data, High frequency transactions data etc along with other existing, validated Accounting data. The NSMD interface provides a researcher friendly interface and hosts several value add features. The demonstration of NSMD is welcomed by all workshop participants and highly appreciated its value addition.

The format of the workshop being a class room environment allowed participants to interact freely with eminent speakers and the participants left with enriching experience.