Goods and Services Tax (GST) completed its four years in July 2021. It was expected that by implementing GST in the country, the governments (Central and States) would be able to solve many tax-related problems such as tax evasion, cascading effect, increasing competition among states for inviting investment, and most importantly increasing states' tax revenue, more autonomy and expenditure. Has the imposition of GST in India impacted the tax revenue of states? Has the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic impacted the GST of all the states and union territories? The paper deals with these specific questions constituting a sample of all states and some union territories for the period 2015 to 2021 categorized into pre-GST (2015-2017) and post-GST (2017-2021) period. The secondary data comprises average proportion of own tax revenue of states in their total revenue, and the data has been analyzed to find out whether imposition of GST has impacted the collection of own tax revenue of states, and whether the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the collection of SGST and UTGST of states and union territories. The tools and techniques applied for testing the hypothesis are Wilcoxon Sign Rank Test, paired t-test and Kruskal-Wallis H-test. The findings reveal that imposition of GST has no significant impact on own tax revenue of states, but Covid-19 significantly impacted SGST and UTGST.

The paper explores the different aspects of corporate tax in India. Apart from discussing the historical background and reviewing the relevant literature, efforts have been made to analyze certain significant structural aspects of corporate tax in India. The study involves an extensive review of literature and analysis of secondary data obtained from government records. The findings indicate that corporate tax contributes a significant portion of the total direct tax revenue of the government and even exceeds the share of personal income taxes in recent years. In 2020-21, however, revenue generation from corporate tax was less than the revenue collected from personal income taxes due to the Covid-19 pandemic and reduced corporate tax rates for certain domestic companies. The buoyancy coefficients calculated for corporate tax and personal income tax (in response to changes in GDP) indicated that these coefficients were generally greater for personal income tax than for corporate tax. Therefore, there is ample scope for enhancing corporate tax revenue through further simplification of tax laws and procedures, rationalization of rates and effective check on evasion.

Tax compliance is a significant means for ensuring better revenue performance. Many studies have adopted Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to investigate the factors influencing taxpayers' compliance intention, but there exists limited literature on consumers' compliance intention towards consumption taxes. Hence, this study seeks to analyze the influence of attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control and moral obligation on consumers' compliance intention. The study used data collected from 186 consumers from Kerala state through an online survey. The result of PLS-SEM analysis revealed a significant influence of the selected variables on the consumers' compliance intention towards consumption taxes, which underscores the need for the government officials to provide due consideration to improving consumer perception in order to bring down the tax gap existing in the economy.

The paper investigates the effect of eleven Audit Committee (AC) characteristics on Firm Performance (FP). It identifies characteristics that significantly influence FP and develops an index to provide a holistic approach to the relationship between AC effectiveness and FP. It applies cross-sectional time-series FGLS regression and checks robustness using panel-corrected standard error regression after identifying heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation, and cross-sectional dependence of 375 observations. The study finds a significant positive effect of AC expertise, attendance in AC meetings, and the absence of executive directors in AC on both Return on Assets (ROA) and market capitalization of the firms. Gender diversity is exclusively significant for ROA, while shareholding positively impacts firm's market capitalization. This study is the first to use some new individual AC characteristics like the absence of executive directors in AC and AC charter and representation of AC members in board meetings.

The paper examines the impact of variables like cash flow from operating activities, net cash inflow or outflow and earnings per share on share price. The study is conducted on a sample of manufacturing companies. The hypothesis identifies the significance of the impact caused by the financial variables on stock price. The methodology used is unit root test, Johansen cointegration test, Vector Error Correction (VEC) and regression. The results prove that the variables are stationary and do not have a trend. Johansen cointegration indicated no long-term relationship between the variables and VEC tests showed no short-term relationship. The variables were also regressed to find closing price and EPS; net cash flow from operating activities has a significant relationship, but net cash inflow or outflow has no significant relationship.

Besides large institutional investors, small and medium investors also play an active role in the investment market, and it is noticed that mutual funds are a major attraction for retail investors. Mutual funds allow investors to pool their savings in complicated securities, stocks and/or bonds and enjoy the benefits of diversification. At the same time, the decision to invest in and exploit the benefits of a mutual fund largely depends on how knowledgeable and competent the investors are. In this backdrop, the study seeks to determine the level of investor awareness regarding mutual fund investments. The sample for the study comprised 50 respondents from the northern region of Kerala, India who had invested in mutual funds. It is found that investors have an average level of mutual fund knowledge, and there are no disparities in their knowledge levels based on gender, educational background and age group. The findings underline the need for developing awareness among potential investors with regard to mutual fund investments.