Financial Liberalization as a Process of Flawed Institutional Change

I argue that the financial liberalization of the last decades, which resulted in a worldwide crisis, relied on an institutional change that ill-shaped actors’ behavior so as to let them enter into unsustainable speculative activities at the expense of macro-stability. To support such an assertion, I draw upon a specific Veblen-Minsky approach to a credit-money economy and its endogenous fragilities. I also maintain that, when financial markets are liberalized and private-interestsrelated self-regulation replaces public macro-prudential supervision, the financial system undergoes institutional deadlock and the ensuing confusion is transformed into a market gridlock. Markets then become unable to recover without public rescue operations of banks. The subsequent negative economic and social consequences are beyond the limits of any acceptable liberal ideology and scientific understanding. Therefore, systemic stability calls for a tighter macro-regulatory framework to remove the domination of speculative finance over economic decisions and activities.     

Job creation and temporary emigration: the Albanian experience1

This paper focuses on job flows and unemployment in Albania during the transition from a closed, communist system to an open, free-market economy, and examines the role of emigration in the restructuring of the country. Our theoretical model indicates that in Albania, temporary emigration may have a significant positive effect on hiring in the private sector, reducing unemployment. Using sectoral data on employment, we illustrate the importance of emigration as an alternative for the Albanian labour force, and we measure the extent to which job ‘destruction’ in some sectors of the economy has been compensated for by job ‘creation’ in others. On these grounds, we compare the progress of Albania with other former socialist countries in Europe.     

Stable schedule matching under revealed preference

Baiou and Balinski (Math. Oper. Res., 27 (2002) 485) studied schedule matching where one determines the partnerships that form and how much time they spend together, under the assumption that each agent has a ranking on all potential partners. Here we study schedule matching under more general preferences that extend the substitutable preferences in Roth (Econometrica 52 (1984) 47) by an extension of the revealed preference approach in Alkan (Econom. Theory 19 (2002) 737). We give a generalization of the Gale-Shapley algorithm and show that some familiar properties of ordinary stable matchings continue to hold. Our main result is that, when preferences satisfy an additional property called size monotonicity, stable matchings are a lattice under the joint preferences of all agents on each side and have other interesting structural properties.     

The Estimation of the Relationships between Water-Natural Gas Usage and Discharge-Emission Permission by Using Binary Logistic Model for the Industrial Establishments

The Thrace region is one of the most important agricultural and industrial regions in Turkey with its plain, deep and productive soil structure. The most important problem is industrial based water and air pollution in this region. In this study, 90 out of 541 establishments that use industrial water in the region were studied representing approximately 17% of the total population. The relationship between water-natural gas usage and discharge-emission permission is estimated by using the binary logistic model. In addition to the economic and social benefits, there are also economic and social losses due to environmental pollution because of the rapid industrialization in the Thrace Region. For example; the rice producers that use Ergene River for irrigation purposes lose efficiency and quality in various levels due to water pollution. According to the research results, an increase in wastewater is a factor that decreases the probability of obtaining discharge permission. Moreover, excessive use of underground water results in decreases in static and dynamic water levels in the region. Because of this result, it is more advantageous for sustainable water management to be directed to the sectors that do not use water for industrial purposes instead of the sectors that use water in their processes.     

The life satisfaction of teachers at work place,research of structural equation modelling regarding general and organized cynicism

This research aims to determine both the predictive role and level of teachers’ life satisfaction, as well as general and organizational cynic perceptions in their workplace. The study sample was composed of 457 teachers who worked in the middle schools in the center and districts of Konya in 2016, who were randomly selected by group sampling. Analysis of the research data was conducted using the statistical program AMOS 18.0, according to structural equation modeling. In the research, loneliness in teachers’ professional lives was considered in two dimensions: as “emotional deprivation” and “social friendship.” According to the research findings, it is evident that organizational cynicism is the most important variable affecting teachers’ emotional deprivation and social companionship levels. The second most important variable affecting teachers' levels of emotional deprivation is general cynicism, while social companionship levels are more affected by life satisfaction. It is also seen that there is a negative relationship between the emotional deprivation and social friendship and life satisfaction variables. The results also demonstrate a slight but statistically significant relationship between the general cynicism and the social friendship levels of teachers.     

Self-employment rates and business size: the roles of occupational choice and credit market frictions

Self-employment rates and project size vary greatly across countries. The main message of this paper is that these broad regularities are consistent with an environment in which a common self-employment technology is available worldwide, but where (a) financial intermediation costs and (b) alternatives in “paid” work differ greatly. Our model indicates that alternatives in paid work are crucial for explaining self-employment rates, whereas high financial intermediation costs primarily affect the scale of projects. We also show that credit use is not informative for predicting either rates of self-employment or the scale of self-employment projects.     

On preferences over subsets and the lattice structure of stable matchings

This paper studies the structure of stable multipartner matchings in two-sided markets where choice functions are quotafilling in the sense that they satisfy the substitutability axiom and, in addition, fill a quota whenever possible. It is shown that (i) the set of stable matchings is a lattice under the common revealed preference orderings of all agents on the same side, (ii) the supremum (infimum) operation of the lattice for each side consists componentwise of the join (meet) operation in the revealed preference ordering of the agents on that side, and (iii) the lattice has the polarity, distributivity, complementariness and full-quota properties. Received: 5 March 1999 / Accepted: 12 May 2000     

Political Business Cycles and Partisan Politics: Evidence from a Developing Economy

This paper explores whether the evidence supports the Political Business Cycle (PBC) theory, Partisan Theory (PT), and Rational Partisan Theory (RPT) using stock market data from Turkey, a rapidly growing developing economy. The results indicate that the PBC hypothesis is not supported by the data. We find permanent partisan effects in the conditional variance but not in returns. The conditional volatility of the returns is higher during the periods in which a leftist party or a coalition government is in office. We also find that the stock market returns temporarily decreases (increases) at the beginning of a right‐wing (left‐wing) government, providing evidence in favor of RPT.     

Income smoothing and foreign asset holdings

In this paper we construct a new methodology to measure the international income smoothing and we present stronger connection between foreign asset holding and international income smoothing for OECD countries.