Fiscal harmonization in view of the Euro adoption: Economic implications for Poland

In this paper, we investigate the ex ante effects of fiscal policy harmonization that might be necessary for the adoption of the common currency on economic growth in Poland using a neoclassical dynamic two-sector general equilibrium model. We study two fiscal policy scenarios. In the first one, we adjust all taxes to German and EU-27 levels, respectively, while in the second one, we change only consumption taxes to German and EU-27 levels. We find that in the first scenario, the current Polish taxes yield the highest rate of growth due to lower capital taxation. However, in the second scenario, German and EU-27 taxes yield the highest rate of growth due to the lower consumption tax on capital-intensive good. From a policy perspective, our results suggest that fiscal policy with lower taxes on capital and capital-intensive goods can generate a higher rate of growth in the long-run. In the case of fiscal harmonization, our findings propose adopting only German or EU-27 consumption tax structure into the Polish tax system.     

Impact of the 1999 East Marmara Earthquake in Turkey

This paper studies responses to the 1999 Marmara Earthquake (Turkey) in which 18,000 people died, 50,000 people were injured, there were 5,000 building collapses and 340,000 damaged buildings, 14,513 businesses closed, 150,000 people became unemployed, and 129,338 were forced to live in prefabricated houses. This research is based on a survey comprising 500 interviews carried out a year after the earthquake. Responsible behavior as the dependent variable is statistically tested with several socio-demographic and attitude variables. The findings indicate social solidarity, knowledge, basic needs, desire for change and psychological status of the disaster survivors were all adversely affected. It was observed that education, employment, social security, knowledge and fatalism have varying impacts on responsible behavior related to preparedness for future earthquakes.     

Attitudes Toward Women in Health Care Organizations: A Turkish Case Study

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the health care employees’ attitudes toward women in health care organizations in Turkey. It was measured using a 25-item scale by Spence, Helmreich, and Stapp (1973 Spence, J. T., Helmreich, R., & Stapp, J. (1973). A short version of the Attitudes toward Women Scale (AWS). Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 2(4), 219–220. doi:10.3758/BF03329252[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). The study was conducted on 541 employees: 279 males and 262 females. Structural equation model (SEM) was applied to analyze the relationship between gender, marital status, and income and attitudes toward woman. The result of this analysis showed that the relations between gender, marital status, and income and attitudes toward woman were statistically significant. All three hypotheses were statistically supported. This result indicated that employees’ marital status and (monthly) income significantly predicted their scores of attitudes toward woman in a positive direction. Besides, employees’ gender significantly predicted their scores of attitudes toward woman in an inverse direction. Future research can focus on investigating the effects of the attitudes toward women on other elements (e.g., performance, motivation, job satisfaction) or a wider sample to reach more generalized results.     

Dependence and precarity in the platform economy

Theory and Society - The rapid growth of Uber and analogous platform companies has led to considerable scholarly interest in the phenomenon of platform labor. Scholars have taken two main...     

Gender differences in income inequality among immigrant populations to the United States

This work examines the level of income inequality of immigrants to the United States. We separately examine income inequality of males and females using several different inequality measures for robustness. The work finds that males have the traditional inverted “U” relationship between inequality and growth but females have the opposite. These differences are caused by several key factors but mainly due to the level of work force participation of the two groups. Finally, we examine the differences in inequality between immigrants who have been in the country for a decade and newly arrived immigrants finding that income inequality is much greater for new immigrants.     

Welfare Regimes for Aging Populations: No Single Path for Reform

We consider recent trends in pension policies in OECD countries in light of demographic aging associated with welfare regime type (Liberal, Social Democratic, Continental, and Southern European). These regime types represent different responsibilities assumed for social security on the part of the market, the state, and the family. While there are significant differences in labor market characteristics, the demographic similarities in aging bring similar pressures for pension reforms across OECD countries. These reforms address fiscal issues in state pensions, typically by increasing the length of the working life, placing more of the pension responsibility on individuals, or converting to defined‐contribution approaches. Our study shows that there is no single path for pension reform. While there are some variations, welfare states tend to follow their traditional paths, which differ across welfare regime types.     

Political violence,asabiyya and identity

This article investigates the relationship between asabiyya (esprit de corps) and political violence within the context of the Kurdish experience, which relies heavily on the presence and activities of armed groups within the society. Furthermore, this article reveals different possibilities for how an armed group can be diffused into a close ethnic unit and transforms its collective solidarity and consciousness by orienting it towards the use of violence. Lastly, it concludes that this engagement changes the content and forms of asabiyya while reshaping social identities in a complex way.     

Meta-analysis of univariate P-values

We propose a new meta-analysis method to pool univariate p-values across independent studies and we compare our method with that of Fisher, Stouffer, and George through simulations and identify sub-spaces where each of these methods are optimal and propose a strategy to choose the best meta-analysis method under different sub-spaces. We compare these meta-analysis approaches using p-values from periodicity tests of 4,940 S. Pombe genes from 10 independent time-course experiments and show that our new approach ranks the periodic, conserved, and cycling genes much higher, and detects at least as many genes among the top 1,000 genes, compared to other methods.     

Sharp Threshold Detection Based on Sup-Norm Error Rates in High-Dimensional Models

We propose a new estimator, the thresholded scaled Lasso, in high-dimensional threshold regressions. First, we establish an upper bound on the ?_∞ estimation error of the scaled Lasso estimator of Lee, Seo, and Shin. This is a nontrivial task as the literature on high-dimensional models has focused almost exclusively on ?₁ and ?₂ estimation errors. We show that this sup-norm bound can be used to distinguish between zero and nonzero coefficients at a much finer scale than would have been possible using classical oracle inequalities. Thus, our sup-norm bound is tailored to consistent variable selection via thresholding. Our simulations show that thresholding the scaled Lasso yields substantial improvements in terms of variable selection. Finally, we use our estimator to shed further empirical light on the long-running debate on the relationship between the level of debt (public and private) and GDP growth. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.