Young Adults Living with their Parents and the Influence of Peers

This study examines the impact of peer behaviour on the living arrangements of young adults in the US using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. We achieve identification by exploiting the differences in the timing of leaving the parental home among peers, the individual‐specific nature of the peer groups that are based on friendship nominations, and by including network and cohort fixed effects. Our results indicate that there are statistically significant peer effects on young adults’ decisions to leave the parental home. We discuss various mechanisms and confirm the robustness of our results through a placebo exercise.     

The Power of Social Network Construction and Analysis for Knowledge Discovery in the Medical Referral Process

The social network model is powerful enough to provide for the analysis and study of a variety of application domains from daily life, including health care and health informatics. After the widespread appearance of automated tools capable of deriving and analyzing social networks, social network analysis (SNA) and mining in the health care domain has recently received considerable attention for its key role in understanding how various bodies within the health care system form communities and how they are socially connected with each other. This understanding helps enhance the organizational structures and process flows, among others. In this article, we show how SNA techniques can solve issues in the medical referral system in the Canadian health care system and the like, by analyzing the social network of general practitioners (GPs) and specialists (SPs). One of the main targets is to optimize the communication between GPs and SPs with hopes of decreasing the waiting time of patients to be seen by SPs. Various SNA and mining techniques are described and analyzed, backed by reporting some experimental results.     

Foreign Aid and the Quest for Poverty Reduction: Is Aid to Agriculture Effective?

Development statistics estimate that three quarters of the poor live in rural areas and most of them depend on agriculture and related activities for their livelihood. Consequently, research focusing on economic growth and poverty reduction has found that sustainable rapid transition out of poverty requires a special emphasis on the agricultural sector. This study contributes to the debate on aid effectiveness by disaggregating total aid into subcategories and specifically investigating the relationship between aid given to the agricultural sector and poverty reduction. If agricultural development is more effective in reducing poverty than some other types of development, then foreign aid directed towards agriculture may be more efficient in increasing the well‐being of the poor than aid directed to some other sectors or uses. Our analysis uses panel data for developing aid recipient countries to empirically test this relationship. We find a significant relationship between agricultural aid and poverty reduction in our estimates.     

To liberalize or not to liberalize: Political and economic determinants of financial liberalization

Using a sample of 70 emerging market and developing countries, we examine the political and economic factors which affect the government's decision to liberalize the domestic equity markets. We document that the levels of industrialization and financial development, the quality of investor protection, and the level of the government's involvement in the economy are closely associated with the stock market liberalization decision. Furthermore, we find a positive and significant relation between the amount of foreign financial aid received by the governments in emerging market countries and the probability of stock market liberalization.     

An exploratory analysis of the influence of human resource management activities and organizational climate on job satisfaction in Turkish banks

This study aims to explore the influence of human resource management (HRM) activities and organizational climate on job satisfaction in Turkish banks. The study first examines the relative influence of eight HRM activities of: (i) behavior and attitudes (in recruitment and selection); (ii) teamwork; (iii) extensive training; (iv) written policies; (v) training in multiple functions; (vi) incentives; (vii) performance appraisal; and (viii) feedback on performance on job satisfaction. Second, the influence of six factors relating to organizational climate are examined, again from the view point of their influence on job satisfaction. The second group factors are: (i) support for innovation; (ii) managerial competence and consistency; (iii) workload pressure; (iv) cohesion; (v) organizational boundaries; and (vi) organizational ethics. The data collected through interviews from 346 employees from 19 banks show that in addition to the positive impact of HRM activities, organizational climate in particular makes a significant contribution to job satisfaction. The paper presents the influence of the two groups of factors on job satisfaction and the mechanisms through which these factors foster job satisfaction and their implications for practitioners.     

WHEN DOES IT PAY TO GET INFORMED?*

A repeated principal–agent problem where both sides start out symmetrically uninformed about a productivity‐related parameter and where the principal has the option to costlessly learn this parameter is analyzed. Typically, the principal delays the acquisition of information to avoid costly signaling. If the learning decision of the principal is observable by the agent, the expected delay is longer than if it is unobservable. The discrepancy is due to the ability of the principal to avoid costly signaling when he is known to be uninformed.     

Effort-satisfaction analysis

This method has been developed to enable the analysis of qualitative problems forming a system, in which their states are expressed in terms of satisfaction indices. It is a means of reorganising data obtained from human judgement on partial relations between specific problems, so that a judgement of the system as a whole may be derived. The E-S analysis indicates the changes in the satisfaction indices when additional efforts are made. It also shows the way in which efforts should be distributed to reach an optimum level of the satisfaction indices. The usefulness of this method is shown by an example of planning a research project.     

Reflections of associations and foundations’ applications in new media to increase the quality in disabled people’s lives

Associations and foundations (that support these associations) play a vital role in increasing the life quality of the society in general, and the disabled people in particular. Civil society organizations which place a significant emphasis on the society’s well-being play an active role both in the promotion of disabled people’s rights and the provision of equal opportunities for their active participation in social life. Disabled people represent a disadvantaged group in the society because they experience disadvantages in economic and social life. This study focuses on new media usage of nonprofit oriented associations that are established to support disabled people in Northern Cyprus as a developing country. The content analysis as a quantitative research methodology is used to analyze the Disabled Associations’ and some foundations’ web sites and their official Facebook pages to interpret their identities, their way of communication and their social responsibility projects for increasing the quality of life of disabled people and raising public awareness on disabled people’s rights.