Assessment of blockchain applications in travel and tourism industry

Quality & Quantity - Blockchain technology (BCT) is a network-based system, which is developed to create secure, smart and transparent distributed ledgers. Recently, BCT has been gaining more...     

You May Not Reap What You Sow: How Employees’ Moral Awareness Minimizes Ethical Leadership’s Positive Impact on Workplace Deviance

Although a growing body of research has shown the positive impact of ethical leadership on workplace deviance, questions remain as to whether its benefits are consistent across all situations. In this investigation, we explore an important boundary condition of ethical leadership by exploring how employees’ moral awareness may lessen the need for ethical leadership. Drawing on substitutes for leadership theory, we suggest that when individuals already possess a heightened level of moral awareness, ethical leadership’s role in reducing deviant actions may be reduced. However, when individuals lack this strong moral disposition, ethical leadership may be instrumental in inspiring them to reduce their deviant actions. To enhance the external validity and generalizability of our findings, the current research used two large field samples of working professionals in both Turkey and the USA. Results suggest that ethical leadership’s positive influence on workplace deviance is dependent upon the individual’s moral awareness—helpful for those employees whose moral awareness is low, but not high. Thus, our investigation helps to build theory around the contingencies of ethical leadership and the specific audience for whom it may be more (or less) influential.     

Structural changes,market growth and productivity gains of the US real estate investment trusts in the 1990s

The 1990s were tumultuous times for the US Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) industry. Significant structural changes occurred during the decade, especially after the 1993 Revenue Reconciliation Act, which tremendously boosted the flow of funds into the system by allowing the participation of institutional investors in REITs. As a result, the industry experienced remarkable asset growth during the decade, with a large number of initial public offerings and substantial increases in market capitalization. Employing the Data Envelopment Analysis-type Malmquist index approach, this paper explores the impact of such environmental changes on productivity growth, efficiency change, and technological progress of REITs. Our results indicate that while efficiency of the REITs significantly increased, their average productivity declined and technology regressed during this decade. It appears that the typical REIT has failed to improve technically, but exerted substantial effort to catch up with the best practice ones relying mainly on aggressive growth strategies. However, our empirical results indicate that they might have overextended themselves as most began to suffer from diseconomies of scale.

Volatility Spillover from the Fear Index to Developed and Emerging Markets

This article examines cross-market volatility linkages among the fear index (VIX), the developed-market index (VXEFA), and the emerging-market index (VXEEM). Analysis on the first moments of volatilities reveals that the fear index has a leading role and has information content for VXEFA and VXEEM. A shock to the fear index spillovers to VXEFA and VXEEM and contributes 57.07% and 63.77% to their shocks, respectively. Further analysis on the second moments of volatilities confirms that the volatility indices are highly dynamically correlated while the fear index drives the correlation dynamics with the VXEEM. Correlations increase in turbulent periods and decrease in tranquil periods.     

Identifying price linkages: a review of the literature and an application to the world market of cotton

This paper reviews the literature of price linkages and examines the degree to which cotton prices are linked; it also tests whether such linkages have improved over the last decade. It concludes that the degree of linkage has improved over the last decade while the main source of this improvement appears to be a result of short-run price transmission and to a lesser extent long-run co-movement.     

Ant colony optimization for the single model U-type assembly line balancing problem

An assembly line is a production line in which units move continuously through a sequence of stations. The assembly line balancing problem is defined as the allocation of tasks to an ordered sequence of stations subject to precedence constraints with the objective of optimizing a performance measure. In this paper, we propose ant colony algorithms to solve the single-model U-type assembly line balancing problem. We conduct an extensive experimental study in which the performance of the proposed algorithm is compared against best known algorithms reported in the literature. The results indicate that the proposed algorithms display very competitive performance against them.     

Efficiency, Ownership and Market Structure, Corporate Control and Governance in the Turkish Banking Industry

Turkish banks are quite heterogeneous in terms of organizational form, ownership structure, size, age, portfolio concentration, growth prospects and attitude toward risk. They also exhibit strong variations in performance as measured by several efficiency indices. In the light of theoretical advances in corporate finance and financial institutions, this paper is an in-depth cross-sectional analysis of the Turkish banking sector, which explores the various bank, market and regulatory characteristics that may explain the efficiency variations across banks. Consistent with the related hypotheses investigated, the results indicate that a number of independent bank characteristics are significantly correlated with various efficiency measures.