Examination of the roles of foundations on Turkish education system of Cyprus

The foundation, to be recognized as a commodity which is used for the sake of humanity, is to remove from being a special commodity and to carry on and develop as a resource that could be benefited by society eternally for people’s service. After Cyprus was received by Ottoman Empire, some foundations were installed in order that people could meet their religious and social needs. British-Ottoman defense treaty in June 4, 1878 did not mortgage in any way any either Turkish people or assets in Cyprus. Foundation commodities and Land Registry Office were under the sovereignty and supervision of Ottoman Empire. No change was foreseen on immovable properties and especially status of immovable commodities belonging to the Foundations which are under the property of Ottoman Empire through this treaty. The British Colonial Administration changed the provisions of this treaty unilaterally, and developed a series of transactions towards invading the island. It firstly intervened in Foundations, and it settled an English administrator in pious foundation management. In 1914, it changed the island to be Royalty colony, namely; it acquired the island. Thanks to the royal charter enacted in November 30, 1915, the foundations started to manage with commissioners assigned to the management and benefit from the institution in order to control the commodities of the foundation. The foundations were transformed into Government Offices in 1928, and all of the foundation immovables were left to face the threat of intervention. The Turkish Cypriot foundation commodities and foundations management were exposed to continuous interventions, thus administrative and financial power of foundation institution were weakened. As a result of the changes in law that were made by British Colonial Administration, many lands belonging to the foundations and Varosha (Mara?) Region which is the most important tourism center of Famagusta passed into the ownership of Greeks.     

Deadlines and distractions

We consider a task, demanding a sequence of efforts, that must be completed by a deadline. Effort is not contractible. Agents face shocks to their opportunity cost of time and are sometimes distracted from work. We show that agents who are often distracted may outperform agents who are distracted less often. The reason is that anticipation of distractions induces agents to start earlier for precautionary reasons. Principals can increase the probability of completion, and achieve higher profits, by strategically setting “tight” deadlines, provided that the deadlines can be extended with some positive probability.     

Firm‐Level Competition and Exchange Rate Exposure: Evidence from a Global Survey of Firms

We examine the effect of competition on exchange rate exposure using survey data from 55 countries. We find that exposure increases with the intensity of competition. Exposure is higher when firms face price competition in international and domestic product markets and when rivals compete using an unfair financial advantage. Furthermore, competition is a leading determinant of exposure, dominating the usual determinants. Exposure also increases with several determinants not previously empirically examined, such as firm‐level financial constraints. These results hold for small, large, foreign‐involved, and purely domestic firms. Finally, import‐only firms have higher exposure than export‐only firms. Our survey results are likely to capture exposure before firms’ hedging actions.     

UML modelling concepts of HAZOP to enhance the ability to identify emerging risks

Unified Modelling Language (UML) has a graphical notation for 13 different types of diagrams and can be used as a general modelling tool. Well-known examples of diagram types are class diagrams for modelling classes that can be instanced into objects, state machine diagrams for modelling states in systems and activity diagrams for modelling process flows. A literature survey shows that UML has been used to model concepts and methodologies of risk assessment and risk management. One example is the Coras Framework. The international standard CEI IEC 61882 Hazard and operability (HAZOP) studies describes concepts for investigating and detecting possible hazards in systems. In CEI IEC 6882, guide words like ‘More’ and ‘Less’ are applied to system parameters to invoke deviations in the system and assess possible hazards due to the deviation from the design intent. In this paper, we have used UML to model concepts of CEI IEC 61882 Hazards and operability studies. Diagrams of UML were used to show dependencies and relations between parts of the target system and concepts of CEI IEC 61882. Extensions of UML are suggested to better capture and display the concepts of CEI IEC 61882, the results of a HAZOP study and emerging risk. These extensions are referred to as UML for emerging risks (UML-ER).     

Evaluating early warning indicators of banking crises: Satisfying policy requirements

Ideally, early warning indicators (EWI) of banking crises should be evaluated on the basis of their performance relative to the macroprudential policy maker’s decision problem. We translate several practical aspects of this problem — such as difficulties in assessing the costs and benefits of various policy measures, as well as requirements for the timing and stability of EWIs — into statistical evaluation criteria. Applying the criteria to a set of potential EWIs, we find that the credit-to-GDP gap and a new indicator, the debt service ratio (DSR), consistently outperform other measures. The credit-to-GDP gap is the best indicator at longer horizons, whereas the DSR dominates at shorter horizons.     

Judiciaries in corrupt societies

Recent empirical work shows that judicial dependence can explain high levels of corruption. This paper examines how the dependence of judiciaries influences corruption at different levels of the government in a model where the central government, low-level officials, and the judiciary are corrupt. In the model, the central government sells offices to low-level officials and demands ex-post payments enforced by the judiciary. Because an independent judiciary can rule against the central authority and accept bribes from stealing low-level officials, it reduces corruption at the higher level of government but promotes corruption at the lower level. Therefore, even if highly corrupt, an independent judiciary may reduce total corruption.     

Management in the “neo-paternalistic organization”: The case of worksite health promotion at Scania

This paper proposes a qualitative study of Work Site Health Promotion (WHP) at the large Swedish producer of trucks and buses, Scania. While the concept of WHP implies that it is employees’ improved health at work that is strived for, we suggest that its main area of intervention is neither the work environment, nor what employees do at work, but employees’ lifestyles. To capture the potential of WHP for the management of organization, we introduce the concept of “neo-paternalistic organizational control.” By this term we want to draw attention to how WHP shares paternalistic approaches’ tendency of disregarding the professional-private divide, while also drawing attention to how this extra-professional control dimension is at once less intrusive and more discriminatory than what is traditionally referred to as paternalism in the literature on managerial control.     

Unemployment and gang crime: can prosperity backfire?

In this paper, we study how unemployment affects gang crime. We examine a model of criminal gangs and suggest that a substitution effect between petty crime and severe crime is at work. In the model, non-monetary valuation of gang membership is private knowledge. Thus, the leaders face a trade-off between less crime per member in large gangs and more crime per member in small gangs. A decrease in unemployment may result in a switch from a large gang that requires petty crime to a small gang that requires severe crime.     

Distance to the pre-industrial technological frontier and economic development

This research explores the effects of distance to the pre-industrial technological frontiers on comparative economic development in the course of human history. It establishes theoretically and empirically that distance to the frontier had a persistent non-monotonic effect on a country’s pre-industrial economic development. In particular, advancing a novel measure of the travel time to the technological frontiers, the analysis establishes a robust persistent U-shaped relation between distance to the frontier and pre-industrial economic development across countries. Moreover, it demonstrates that countries, which throughout the last two millennia were relatively more distant from these frontiers, have higher contemporary levels of innovation and entrepreneurial activity, suggesting that distance from the frontier may have fostered the emergence of a culture conducive to innovation, knowledge creation, and entrepreneurship.     

Macroeconomic Expectations and the Size,Value, and Momentum Factors

When examining the sources of risk associated with priced factors, the prior literature often uses macroeconomic realizations to proxy for changes in expectations. However, realizations can be biased, so instead we use changes in macroeconomic forecasts and macroeconomic news surprises. The sensitivity of common factors to macroeconomic risks is not robust, and generally economically and statistically insignificant. Sometimes the factors even hedge risk. Importantly, the weak relation between the factors and risks is not the result of low powered tests. These findings are inconsistent with the notion that the factors are priced because they proxy for the macroeconomic risks examined.