Real Incentive Effects of Soft Information

Both soft, noncontractible, and hard, contractible, information are informative about managerial ability and future firm performance. If a manager's future compensation depends on expectations of ability or future performance, then the manager has implicit incentives to affect the information. We examine the real incentive effects of soft information in a dynamic agency with limited commitment. When long-term contracts are renegotiated, the rewards for future performance inherent in long-term contracts allow the principal partial control over the implicit incentives. This is because the soft information affects the basis for contract renegotiation. With short-term contracts, the principal has no control over the basis for contract negotiation, and thus long-term contracts generally dominate short-term contracts. With long-term contracts, the principal's control over implicit incentives is characterized in terms of effective contracting on an implicit aggregation of the soft information that arises from predicting (forming expectations of) future performance. We provide sufficient conditions for soft information to have no real incentive effects. In general, implicit incentives not controllable by the principal include fixed effects, such as career concerns driven by labor markets external to the agency. When controllable incentives span the fixed effects of career concerns, the latter have no real effects with regard to total managerial incentives—they would optimally be the same with or without career concerns. Our analysis suggests empirical tests for estimating career concerns that should explicitly incorporate noncontractible information.     

Consumers' awareness,acceptance and attitudes towards functional foods in Turkey

The aim of the present study was to investigate consumers' awareness, acceptance and attitudes towards functional foods in Turkey. Eight hundred and eight people participated in this study: aged between 20 and 80 years, 38.5% were male and 61.5% were female. Participants were given a questionnaire and were asked to fill it in by themselves to minimize the influence of the interviewer. Results indicated that socio‐demographic characteristics such as age, education level and income level are important indicators of consumers' awareness and consumption of functional food. The results show that the female respondents were 2.987 times more aware of functional food than the male respondents. Similarly, the likelihood of respondents having awareness of functional food was 1.431 times greater among those who had a higher educational level than among those with a lower educational level. Consumers who used vitamin supplements were 1.228 times more aware of functional food than other consumers. The results show that older respondents were 3.395 times more aware of functional food than younger respondents. Respondents with a history of familial diseases were more likely than others to have consumed margarine with plant sterol, fruit juices fortified with vitamin C, and breakfast cereals fortified with vitamins and minerals. Those with a diet‐related problem were more likely to have consumed cholesterol‐lowering products than those without a problem. As a conclusion, this study has shown that socio‐demographic characteristics such as age, education and income levels, and prices are important indicators that influence consumers' awareness and consumption of functional food. These results suggest that this type of knowledge could affect consumers' interest in functional foods, and therefore educational strategies might be necessary to encourage the consumption of functional foods.     

Lessons for Development from the Japanese Experience

Economic class, defined in relation to its actual control over the economy’s productive assets, is the most useful lens for examining power distribution in the post-Soviet transition and clarifying the neoliberal nature of its social provisioning processes. Using Ukraine as an illustration, I argue that only ownership empowerment of economically powerless classes can democratize the oligarchic transition economies. As an exit strategy from oligarchic capitalism, I recommend that state capitalism be implemented, as a transitory condition only, to divest oligarchs of unlawfully acquired economic power. Then, progressive restructuring of oligarchic companies must be conducted through broadening property ownership to include shared ownership and worker participation in economic decisions. I conclude that only by nurturing the democratic fundamentals of the economy and promoting a social democratic welfare state could a government in post-Euromaidan Ukraine initiate its own social control and create a genuine political and economic democracy.     

A Model of Value Creation: Strategic View

Value creation has long been hailed as the major objective of business firms by many management researchers. Some authors state that a firm must create value for its shareholders; some insist that value must be created not just for shareholders but also for all stakeholders. However, most discussions of value creation do not address an important question: "For whom the value is created?" The purpose of this paper is to take a first step to fill this void and propose a model of value creation along three dimensions: financial, nonfinancial, and time. It is hoped that the model will contribute to a better understanding of how strategic and operational decisions of managers may create value for some stakeholders while destroying it for others.     

The Vortex of Rights: ‘Right to the City’ at a Crossroads

The right to the city concept has recently attracted a great deal of attention from radical theorists and grassroots activists of urban justice, who have embraced the notion as a means to analyze and challenge neoliberal urbanism. It has, moreover, drawn considerable attention from United Nations (UN) agencies, which have organized meetings and outlined policies to absorb the notion into their own political agendas. This wide‐ranging interest has created a conceptual vortex, pulling together discordant political projects behind the banner of the right to the city. This article analyzes such projects by reframing the right to the city concept to foreground its roots in Marxian labor theory of value. It argues that Lefebvre's formulation of the right to the city — based on the contradiction between use value and exchange value in capitalist urbanism — is invaluable for analyzing and delineating contradictory urban politics that are pulled into the vortex of the right to the city. Following Lefebvre's lead in such an analysis, however, reveals certain limitations of Lefebvre's own account. The article therefore concludes with a theoretical proposition that aims to open up space for further critical debate on the right to the city.     

The impact of capital market imperfections on investment–cash flow sensitivity

We examine the investment–cash flow sensitivity of US manufacturing firms in relation to five factors associated with capital market imperfections – fund flows, institutional ownership, analyst following, bond ratings, and an index of antitakeover amendments. We find a steady decline in the estimated sensitivity over time. Furthermore, we find that investment–cash flow sensitivity decreases with increasing fund flows, institutional ownership, analyst following, antitakeover amendments and with the existence of a bond rating. The overall evidence suggests that investment–cash flow sensitivity decreases with factors that reduce capital market imperfections.     

Business Cycle Synchronization of Turkey with the Eurozone and the United States: What Has Changed Since 2001?

Using wavelet methodology, we make a detailed spectral analysis of the business cycle synchronization of the Turkish economy with the eurozone and the United States. We take into account the dramatic change in the main economic indicators in the Turkish economy after the 2001 financial crisis. We find that the correlation of Turkish cycles with the cycles of the eurozone and the United States increased substantially after 2001. Moreover, the correlation of the Turkish cycles with the U.S. cycles is not lower than that with the euro cycles after 2001. Accordingly, analyzing the effect of international developments should not be confined to the trade channel. We submit that capital flows offer a reasonable explanation for the high correlation with the United States.     

Extending the Resource‐Based Approach to Livelihoods: An Urban Application to Turkish Gecekondu Households

This article critically examines the existing conceptualizations of and explanations for the socioeconomic behaviour of poor households in order to lay the foundations of a new model designed to extend the existing resource‐based approach to livelihoods. The proposed model groups ‘household responses to poverty’ into four key types: income generation, income allocation, consumption and investment. In explaining household responses and their poverty outcomes, it focuses on the role of different resources beyond income (e.g. social capital), along with the wider structural forces and household characteristics that influence the availability and benefit delivery capacity of these resources. The new model is shown to provide a theoretically more sophisticated framework with greater explanatory power and empirical applicability.