This paper investigates the job satisfaction in relation to managerial attitudes towards employees and firm size using the linked employer-employee survey results in Britain.We first investigate the management-employee relationships and the firm size using maximum likelihood probit estimation . Next various measues of job satisfaction are related to the management-employee relations via maximum likelihood ordered probit estimates. Four measures of job satisfaction that have not been used often are considered. They are satisfaction with influence over job; satisfaction with amount of pay; satisfaction with sense of achievement and satisfaction with respect from supervisors. Main findings indicate that management-employee relationships are less satisfactory in the large firms than in the small firms. Job satisfaction levels are lower in large firms. Less satisfactory management-employee relationships in the large firms may be a major source of the observed lower level of job satisfaction in them. These results have important policy implications from the point of view of the firm management while achieving the aims of their organizations in particular in the large firms in the area of management-employee relationships. Improving the management-employee relations in large firms will increase employee satisfaction in many respects as well as increase productivity and reduce turnover. The nature of the management-employee relations with firm size and job satisfaction has not been investigated before.

The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between type of welfare regimes and military expenditures. There is a sizeable empirical literature on the development of the welfare state and on the typology of the welfare regimes. There appear to be, however, no empirical studies that examine welfare regimes with special attention to military spending. This study aims at providing a comprehensive analysis on the topic by considering several different welfare regime typologies. To do so, we use dynamic panel data analysis for 37 countries for the period of 1988-2003 by considering a wide range of control variables such as type of political regimes, inequality measures, number of terrorist events, and size of the armed forces. Our findings, in line with the literature, show that there is a positive relationship between income inequality and share of military expenditures in the central government budget, and that the number of terrorist events is a significant factor that affects both the level of military expenditure and inequality. Also, the paper reveals a significant negative relationship between social democratic welfare regimes and military expenditures.

This paper employs STCC-GARCH and DSTCC-GARCH models to investigate the time varying return co-movements between Chinese stock markets and stock markets of the US, UK, France and Japan. Unlike the earlier literature, we uncover that there are noticeable rising trends in conditional correlations among these markets particularly following the financial reforms in China. Moreover, the empirical results of DSTCC-GARCH specifications with time and various volatility measures indicate that the correlations increase not only over time but also during calm periods for A-shares, though mixed results are obtained for B-shares.

The mechanism by which monetary policy affects financial institutions’ risk perception and/or tolerance has been called the ‘risk-taking channel’ of monetary policy. It has been recently argued that periods of low interest rates due to expansionary monetary policy, might induce an increase in bank risk-appetite and risk-taking behavior. This paper investigates the bank specific characteristics of risk-taking behavior of the Turkish banking sector as well as the existence of risk taking channel of monetary policy in Turkey. Using bank level quarterly data over the period 2002-2012 a dynamic panel model is estimated. Our sample accounts for 53 banks that have been active in Turkey during the period. To deal with the potential endogeneity between risk and bank specific characteristics, which are explanatory variables in our model, the GMM estimator proposed by Arellano and Bover (1995) and Blundell and Bond (1998) is used. Four alternative risk measures are used in the analysis; three accounting-based risk indicators and a market-based indicator- Expected Default Frequency. We find evidence that low levels of interest rates have a positive impact on banks’ risk-taking behavior for all the risk measures. Specifically, low short term interest rates reduce the risk of outstanding loans; however short term interest rates below a theoretical benchmark increase risk-taking of banks. This result holds for macroeconomic controls as well. Furthermore, in terms of bank specific characteristics, our analysis suggests that large, liquid and well-capitalized banks are less prone to risk-taking.

This paper aims to investigate the actual nature of the interest rate pass-through to Turkish cash, automobile, housing and corporate loan rates. Focusing on the possibility of nonlinearity in the adjustment of lending rates due to financial market conditions and monetary policies, we adopt the threshold autoregressive (TAR) and momentum threshold autoregressive (MTAR) models of Enders and Siklos (2001). Empirical results suggest substantial asymmetries (nonlinearities) in all lending rates. More specifically, banks adjust their lending rates faster in response to increases in negative discrepancies from the long-run equilibrium arising from an increase in the money market rate, while they act slowly following money market rate decreases. Furthermore, the degree of reluctance of banks to follow money market rate decreases appears to vary across lending rates, suggesting the existence of sectoral heterogeneities besides asymmetries.

This paper shows that the structural breaks are an important characteristic of the monthly labor force participation rate (LFPR) series of Australia, Canada and the USA. Therefore we allow for endogenously determined multiple structural breaks in the empirical specifications of fractionally integrated ARMA model. The findings indicate that contrary to the previous research the LFPRs of Australia, Canada and the USA are stationary implying that the informational value of the unemployment rates about the behavior of labor markets and the causes of joblessness are useful.

This paper studies the role of banking sector in monetary policy transmission in Turkey covering the period 1988-2009. Specifically, we investigate the impact of monetary policy changes on banks’ lending behavior. Given the changes in the policy stance and developments in the financial system following the implementation of structural reforms in the aftermath of the 2000-01 crisis, the analysis is further conducted for the two sub-periods: 1988-2001 and 2002-2009, to examine whether there is a change in the functioning of the credit channel. Based on bank-level data, empirical evidence suggests cross sectional heterogeneity in banks’ response to monetary policy changes during 1988-2009. Regarding the results of the pre-crisis and post-crisis periods, we find that an operative bank lending channel existed in 1988-2001, however its impact became much stronger thereafter. Furthermore, there are significant differences in the distributional effects due to bank specific characteristics in the impact of monetary policy on credit supply between the two sub-periods. While the results indicate an operative bank lending channel due to earnings capability and asset quality in the first period, size, liquidity, capitalization, asset quality and managerial efficiency seem to make a difference in the lending responses of banks to monetary policy in 2002-2009.

In this study, we examine the formal/informal sector earnings differentials in the Turkish labor market using detailed econometric methodologies and a novel panel data set drawn from the 2006-2009 Income and Living Conditions Survey (SILC). In particular, we test if there is evidence of traditional segmented labor markets theory which postulates that informal workers are typically subject to lower remuneration than similar workers in the formal sector. Estimation of standard Mincer earnings equations at the mean using OLS on a pooled sample of workers confirms the existence of an informal penalty, but also shows that almost half of this penalty can be explained by observable variables. Along wage/self-employment divide, our results are in line with the traditional theory that formal-salaried workers are paid significantly higher than their informal counterparts. Confirming the heterogeneity within informal employment, we find that self-employed are often subject to lower remuneration compared to those who are salaried. Moreover, using quantile regression estimations, we show that pay differentials are not uniform along the earnings distribution. More specifically, we find that informal penalty decreases with the earnings level, implying a heterogeneous informal sector with upper-tier jobs carrying a significant premium and lower-tier jobs being largely penalized. Finally, fixed effects estimation of the earnings gap depict that unobserved individual fixed effects when combined with controls for observable individual and employment characteristics explain the pay differentials between formal and informal employment entirely, thereby implying that formal/informal segmentation may not be a stylized fact of the Turkish labor market as previously thought.

Several recent empirical studies have examined the gender effects of education on economic growth or on steady-state level of output using the much exploited, familiar cross-country data in order to determine their quantitative importance and the direction of correlation. This paper undertakes a similar study of the gender effects of education using province level data for Turkey. The main findings indicate that female education positively and significantly affects the steady-state level of labor productivity, while the effect of male education is in general either positive or insignificant. Separate examination of the effect of educational gender gap was negative on output. The results are found to be robust to a number of sensitivity analyses, such as elimination of outlier observations, controls for simultaneity and measurement errors, controls for omitted variables by including regional dummy variables, steady-state versus growth equations and considering different samples.

The two major earthquakes which struck northwestern Turkey in 1999, caused enormous amounts of death and destruction, and exposed rampant government corruption involving construction and zoning code violations, as a factor magnifying the disaster. The opposition parties and one of the incumbent parties which participated in previous national governments and held power in current and past municipal administrations were responsible for that. The other two incumbent parties came to power only a short time before the earthquakes and controlled almost none of the local administrations in the disaster zone. They on the other hand, were responsible for the incompetence shown in providing relief, for involvement in corruption related to those efforts, and for failing to prosecute the businessmen who constructed the shoddy buildings and the corrupt officials who permitted them. How voters responded to these in the 2002 parliamentary elections is investigated, using cross-provincial data, controlling for other social, political and economic factors. The fact that different groups of parties were responsible for different types of corruption and mismanagement provided us with a unique data to differentiate between voter responses to corruption and incompetence, and to corruption which has occurred before and after the earthquakes. Our results show that voters punished all of the political parties which participated in governments during the previous decade. The party in charge of the ministry responsible for disaster relief, and parties that controlled more of the city administrations in the quake zone were blamed more. The newly formed Justice and Development Party (AKP) was the main beneficiary of the votes lost by these parties. Our results corroborate the view in the corruption literature that voters react drastically only when the corruption is massive, the information on it highly-credible and well-publicized, involves large number of political parties, not accompanied by competent governance, and a non-corrupt alternative is available.

Informality has long been a salient phenomenon in developing country labor markets, thus has been addressed in several theoretical and empirical research. Turkey, given its economic and demographic dynamics, provides rich evidence for a growing, heterogeneous and multifaceted informal labor market. However, the existing evidence on labor informality in Turkey is mixed and scant. Along these lines, we aim to extend the existing literature by providing a diagnosis of dynamic worker flows across distinct labor market states and identifying the effects of certain individual and job characteristics on variant mobility patterns. More specifically, we first develop and discuss a set of probability statistics based on annual worker transitions across distinct employment states utilizing Markov transition processes. As Bosch and Maloney (2007:3) argue: “labor status mobility can be assumed as a process in which changes in the states occur randomly through time, and probabilities of moves between particular states are governed by Markov transition matrices”. Towards this end, we will use the novel Income and Living Conditions Survey (SILC) panel data set to compute the transition probabilities of individuals moving across the labor market states of formal-salaried, informal-salaried, formal self-employed, informal self-employed, unemployed and inactive. The transitions analysis is conducted separately for two, three and four year panels pertaining to 2006 to 2007, 2006 to 2008 and 2006 to 2009 transitions; for total, male and female samples; and lastly for total and non-agricultural samples. In this way, we aim to contribute to the limited body of stylized facts available on mobility and informality in the Turkish labor market. Next, we conduct multinomial logit regressions individually for each set of panel to identify the impact of individual characteristics (i.e. gender, age, education level, work experience, sector of economic activity, firm size, number of other household members, having/not having children, rural/urban) underlying worker transitions. The results reveal several relationships between the covariates and likelihood of variant transitions, and are of remarkable importance for designing policy to address labor informality and reduce its negative externalities.