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.     

Threshold Autoregression with a Unit Root

This paper develops an asymptotic theory of inference for an unrestricted two‐regime threshold autoregressive (TAR) model with an autoregressive unit root. We find that the asymptotic null distribution of Wald tests for a threshold are nonstandard and different from the stationary case, and suggest basing inference on a bootstrap approximation. We also study the asymptotic null distributions of tests for an autoregressive unit root, and find that they are nonstandard and dependent on the presence of a threshold effect. We propose both asymptotic and bootstrap‐based tests. These tests and distribution theory allow for the joint consideration of nonlinearity (thresholds) and nonstationary (unit roots). Our limit theory is based on a new set of tools that combine unit root asymptotics with empirical process methods. We work with a particular two‐parameter empirical process that converges weakly to a two‐parameter Brownian motion. Our limit distributions involve stochastic integrals with respect to this two‐parameter process. This theory is entirely new and may find applications in other contexts. We illustrate the methods with an application to the U.S. monthly unemployment rate. We find strong evidence of a threshold effect. The point estimates suggest that the threshold effect is in the short‐run dynamics, rather than in the dominate root. While the conventional ADF test for a unit root is insignificant, our TAR unit root tests are arguably significant. The evidence is quite strong that the unemployment rate is not a unit root process, and there is considerable evidence that the series is a stationary TAR process.     

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...     

Shipping Fees or Shipping Free? A Tale of Two Price Partitioning Strategies in Online Retailing

In this article, we study the price partitioning decisions of online retailers regarding shipping and handling (S&H) fees. Specifically, we analyze two partitioning formats used by retailers in this context. In the first scenario, retailers present customers with a price that is partitioned into a product price and a separate S&H surcharge (the PS strategy); in the second, customers are offered free shipping through a non‐partitioned format where the product price already includes the shipping cost (the ZS strategy). We first develop a stylized game‐theoretic model that captures the competitive dynamics between (and within) these two formats. Analysis of the model provides insights into how both firm and product level characteristics drive a retailer's strategic choice regarding which partitioning format to adopt and, hence, determines the equilibrium market structure in terms of proportion of ZS and PS retailers. Subsequently, we conduct empirical analyses, based on product and S&H prices data for two different product categories (digital cameras and printers) collected from online retailers, to validate all the results of our theoretical model. We establish that PS retailers charge lower product prices than ZS ones, but the total price (product + S&H) charged is higher for the first group. The S&H charge for PS retailers can be significant—it is, on average, 5.4% (printers) and 3.0% (digital cameras) for our two product categories. Furthermore, retailers which are popular and/or face risky cost environment are more likely to opt for the ZS strategy, while retailers whose portfolio mostly includes large or heavy products with high cost (S&H)‐to‐price ratios usually choose the PS strategy. Lastly, our empirical study also illustrates that the price adjustment behavior of retailers is affected by their shipping‐fee policies—for example, ZS retailers change their product prices almost 1.5 times more frequently than PS ones.     

Sensing Abnormal Resource Flow Using Adaptive Limit Process Charts in a Complex Supply Network*

Supply networks are becoming increasingly complex with multiple overlapping relationships between firms that may span across industries. Consequently, inventory management is becoming more difficult as managers have to cope with variability in the supply flows that originate from different parts of the network. Managers that quickly sense abnormal flows may intervene and adapt their inventory policies in response to system changes. In this article, we present a framework for sensing abnormal flows originating within the upstream supply network of a focal organization. Our framework combines time series modeling with process charts to identify abnormal flow patterns in the incoming supply streams. It is a flexible framework that uses off‐the‐shelf technology to provide managers with a process that can be employed for monitoring multiple individual or aggregated data streams originating within any complex system such as complex adaptive supply networks. We illustrate our framework on four years of longitudinal supply data from the second largest food bank in the United States. We identify multiple instances of abnormal supply flows and validate our results through rigorous inventory analysis as well as field‐based expert interviews. We discuss the implications of our findings for inventory management in complex supply networks, both from academic and practitioner points of view.     

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.