Business Ethics in Turkey: An Empirical Investigation with Special Emphasis on Gender

In today's complex business world, the question of business ethics is increasingly gaining importance as managers and employees face numerous ethical dilemmas in their jobs. The ethical climate in the Turkish business environment is also at a critical stage, and the business community as a whole is troubled by ethical problems. This study attempts to determine the effect of individual, managerial and organizational factors on the ethical judgments of Turkish managers, and to evaluate the ethical perceptions of these managers. The findings of this study reveal that the ethics score, the measure of ethical judgment, of Turkish managers differs significantly only with respect to gender and that female managers have higher ethics score than male managers. Other individual, managerial and organizational factors considered in this study do not have any significant effect on the ethical judgments of the managers. A comparative analysis between female and male managers in terms of their ranking of the eleven ethical business scenarios, ranking of the sixteen unethical acts, ranking of the factors influencing managers to engage in unethical practices, and ranking of the various parties to whom a company is socially responsible enables the researchers to enlighten the subject of business ethics in Turkey.     

Fits,misfits and interactions: learning at work,job satisfaction and job‐related well‐being

The resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm has focused attention on the importance of aligning employees' needs with the requirements of the jobs they do. This article focuses on how these needs and requirements interact in terms of learning. It does so in two ways. First, it develops new survey instruments to capture the learning demands of jobs and the learning dispositions of workers and uses them for the first time in a survey of 2,810 employees. Second, it examines how these person and job characteristics correlate with specific aspects of job satisfaction and job‐related well‐being. The results show that although learning alignment is associated with high levels of satisfaction and well‐being, not all learning misalignments are associated with the reverse.     

International Evidence on Risk Taking by Banks Around the Global Financial Crisis

This study models the risks of commercial banks from the United States and developed, emerging, and frontier countries while controlling for bank- and country-specific variables within a panel framework. Bank risk is measured by both the traditional Z-score and a composite bank risk index proposed by the authors. The findings suggest that even though the riskiness of all banks from different country groups increased following the financial crisis, the magnitude of the change is not the same across groups. During the post-crisis period, banks in developed, emerging, and frontier countries experienced a smaller increase in their risk compared to their counterparts in the United States. This article provides support for the claim that banks in emerging and frontier countries have experienced the effects of the financial crisis to a lesser extent compared to those in the United States.     

Testing for Predictability in panels with General Predictors

The difficulty of predicting returns has recently motivated researchers to start looking for tests that are either more powerful or robust to more features of the data. Unfortunately, the way that these tests work typically involves trading robustness for power or vice versa. The current paper takes this as its starting point to develop a new panel‐based approach to predictability that is both robust and powerful. Specifically, while the panel route to increased power is not new, the way in which the cross‐section variation is exploited also to achieve robustness with respect to the predictor is. The result is two new tests that enable asymptotically standard normal and chi‐squared inference across a wide range of empirically relevant scenarios in which the predictor may be stationary, moderately non‐stationary, nearly non‐stationary, or indeed unit root non‐stationary. The type of cross‐section dependence that can be permitted in the predictor is also very general, and can be weak or strong, although we do require that the cross‐section dependence in the regression errors is of the strong form. What is more, this generality comes at no cost in terms of complicated test construction. The new tests are therefore very user‐friendly. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Specialty care single and multi-period location–allocation models within the Veterans Health Administration

Optimal location of specialty care services within any healthcare network is increasingly important for balancing costs, access to care, and patient-centeredness. Typical long-range planning efforts attempt to address a myriad of quantitative and qualitative issues, including within-network access within reasonable travel distances, space capacity constraints, costs, politics, and community commitments. To help inform these decisions, single and multi-period mathematical integer programs were developed that minimize total procedure, travel, non-coverage, and start-up costs to increase network capacity subject to access constraints. These models have been used to help the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) explore relationships and tradeoffs between costs, coverage, service location, and capacity and to inform larger strategic planning discussions. Results indicate significant opportunity to simultaneously reduce total cost, reduce total travel distances, and increase within-network access, the latter being linked to better care continuity and outcomes. An application to planning short and long-term sleep apnea care across the VHA New England integrated network, for example, produced 10–15% improvements in each performance measure. As an example of further insight provided by these analyses, most optimal solutions increase the amount of outside-network care, contrary to current trends and policies to reduce external referrals.     

Hierarchical multimodal hub location problem with time-definite deliveries

Hierarchical multimodal hub location problem is a cost-minimizing hub covering problem where two types of hubs and hub links, accounting for ground and air transportation, are to be established, while ensuring time-definite deliveries. We propose a mixed-integer programming formulation and perform a comprehensive sensitivity analysis on the Turkish network. We show that the locations of airport hubs are less sensitive to the cost parameters compared to the locations of ground hubs and it is possible to improve the service quality at not much additional cost in the resulting multimodal networks. Our methodology provides the means for a detailed trade-off analysis.     

Portfolio allocation and international risk sharing

Abstract We show that recent explanations of the consumption‐real exchange rate anomaly that rely on goods and financial market frictions are not robust to introducing just one additional international asset. When portfolios are selected optimally, international trade in two nominal bonds implies a consumption‐real exchange rate correlation that is too high compared with the data even when there are many shocks. Monetary policy specification plays a potentially important role for the degree of risk sharing provided by nominal bonds, both in the benchmark model with only tradable and non‐tradable sector supply shocks and also in the model that allows for news.     

CCE estimation of factor‐augmented regression models with more factors than observables

This paper considers estimation of factor‐augmented panel data regression models. One of the most popular approaches towards this end is the common correlated effects (CCE) estimator of Pesaran (Estimation and inference in large heterogeneous panels with a multifactor error structure. Econometrica, 2006, 74, 967–1012, 2006). For the pooled version of this estimator to be consistent, either the number of observables must be larger than the number of unobserved common factors, or the factor loadings must be distributed independently of each other. This is a problem in the typical application involving only a small number of regressors and/or correlated loadings. The current paper proposes a simple extension to the CCE procedure by which both requirements can be relaxed. The CCE approach is based on taking the cross‐section average of the observables as an estimator of the common factors. The idea put forth in the current paper is to consider not only the average but also other cross‐section combinations. Asymptotic properties of the resulting combination‐augmented CCE (C³E) estimator are provided and tested in small samples using both simulated and real data.     

Inflation expectations in Turkey: learning to be rational

Turkey implemented an ambitious restructuring of the economy in the past several years, including the adoption of inflation targeting along with a floating exchange rate regime. Inflation came down from almost triple digits to single digits between 2001 and 2005. This particular episode of the Turkish economy sets a genuine case study for investigating the possible changes in the behaviour of inflation expectations upon a regime shift. Accordingly, this study analyses inflation expectations in Turkey, focusing especially on the post-2001 transition phase. We first conduct classical tests of unbiasedness and efficiency using aggregate survey data between August 2001 and October 2007 to get a statistical benchmark for rationality; we find that classical tests reject full rationality hypothesis for all series except next month's Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation expectations. Then, we carry out Time-Varying Parameter (TVP) estimates based on a Kalman filter to see how the coefficients in the classical test equations evolve over time. This framework allows us to see whether there is convergence to rationality in terms of unbiasedness and efficiency. We find that forecast performance has improved through time, as the coefficients on the test equations shows movement towards values implied by unbiasedness and efficiency hypotheses, supporting the learning hypothesis.