The Cultural Orientations of Entrepreneurs and Employees’ Job Satisfaction: The Turkish Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) Case

The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether cultural orientations which were pervasive and salient in the society of SMEs’ entrepreneurs predict employees’ job satisfaction. Paternalism, collectivism, individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance were assessed as pervasive and salient attributes for Turkish society. Data were gathered from 217 male SMEs entrepreneurs and 1140 employees. The cultural orientations scales together with some questions related to the firms and demographics, and job diagnostic index (JDI) with demographical questions were applied to entrepreneurs and employees, respectively. The findings of this study revealed that paternalism, collectivism and power distance predicted employee job satisfaction significantly. It was argued that the congruency between entrepreneurs’ cultural orientations and employees’ cultural background and expectations, which was shaped by the organizational socialization process, might lead these results.     

Sense of Community and Individual Well-Being: A Research on Fulfillment of Needs and Social Capital in the Turkish Community

In this research, the relationship between fulfillment of needs, social capital, and sense of community and individual well-being has been explored by testing the perception of sense of community by means of residential satisfaction. The study involves the participations of 677 adults from Mersin, Turkey. A model in which social capital mediates the relationship of fulfillment of needs with sense of community and individual well-being has been validated by path analysis. Accordingly, fulfillment of needs and variables of social capital significantly predict sense of community and individual well-being. The results have been discussed in detail with regard to socio-cultural aspects.     

Modelling oil and gas supply disruption risks using extreme-value theory and copula

In this paper, we are concerned with modelling oil and gas supply disruption risks using extreme-value theory and copula. We analyse financial and volumetric losses due to both oil and gas supply disruptions and investigate their dependence structure using real data. In order to illustrate the impact of crude oil and natural gas supply disruptions on an energy-dependent economy, Nigeria is considered as a case study. Computational studies illustrate that the generalized extreme-value distribution anticipates higher financial losses and extreme-value copulas produce the best fit for financial and volumetric losses compared with normal copulas. Moreover, multivariate financial losses exhibit stronger positive dependence than volumetric losses.     

The Impacts of Individualism/Collectivism, Self-Esteem, and Feeling of Mastery on Life Satisfaction among the Turkish University Students and Academicians

This study had two goals. The first one was todetermine whether the predictors ofindividualism/collectivism, self-esteem, andfeeling of mastery in a specific socio-culturalenvironment in which individuals from differentcultural backgrounds interact with each otherexplain life satisfaction. The second goal wasto illuminate the contradiction between crosscultural and local findings about ongoingTurkish cultural experience within the relatedvariables and the frame of the socio culturalenvironment. Research participants numbered696, 388 students and 308 academicians ofMersin University. Students were enrolled inthe Faculty of Art and Science, the Faculty ofEngineering and the Faculty of AdministrativeSciences and Economics. Fifty percent of themwere females and the fifty percent were males.The academic sample consisted of the academicpersonnel (instructors, assistants, lecturers,and professors) in the above-mentionedfaculties. The sample made up of academicianswas also half female and half male. Theparticipants responded to the Turkish versionof the short form of Individualism/CollectivismScale (INDCOL), the Rosenberg Self-EsteemScale, the Mastery Scale and the Satisfactionwith Life Scale. Among these scales, the shortform of INDCOL showed a high level of constructvalidity and the Mastery Scale showed amoderate level of construct validity in therelated samples. Others have showed high levelsof validities and reliabilities in the previousTurkish studies conducted. The findings of thisstudy revealed that individualism predictedhigh life satisfaction and collectivismpredicted low life satisfaction. Self-esteemand mastery also predicted high lifesatisfaction. It was observed in this studythat university life contributed to maleuniversity students being autonomous andindependent.     

Bayesian Analysis of Instrumental Variable Models: Acceptance-Rejection within Direct Monte Carlo

We discuss Bayesian inferential procedures within the family of instrumental variables regression models and focus on two issues: existence conditions for posterior moments of the parameters of interest under a flat prior and the potential of Direct Monte Carlo (DMC) approaches for efficient evaluation of such possibly highly non-elliptical posteriors. We show that, for the general case of m endogenous variables under a flat prior, posterior moments of order r exist for the coefficients reflecting the endogenous regressors’ effect on the dependent variable, if the number of instruments is greater than m +r, even though there is an issue of local non-identification that causes non-elliptical shapes of the posterior. This stresses the need for efficient Monte Carlo integration methods. We introduce an extension of DMC that incorporates an acceptance-rejection sampling step within DMC. This Acceptance-Rejection within Direct Monte Carlo (ARDMC) method has the attractive property that the generated random drawings are independent, which greatly helps the fast convergence of simulation results, and which facilitates the evaluation of the numerical accuracy. The speed of ARDMC can be easily further improved by making use of parallelized computation using multiple core machines or computer clusters. We note that ARDMC is an analogue to the well-known “Metropolis-Hastings within Gibbs” sampling in the sense that one ‘more difficult’ step is used within an ‘easier’ simulation method. We compare the ARDMC approach with the Gibbs sampler using simulated data and two empirical data sets, involving the settler mortality instrument of Acemoglu et al. (2001 Acemoglu , D. , Johnson , S. , Robinson , J. A. ( 2001 ). The colonial origins of comparative development: An empirical investigation . American Economic Review 91 ( 5 ): 1369 – 1401 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and father's education's instrument used by Hoogerheide et al. (2012a Hoogerheide , L. F. , Block , J. H. , Thurik , A. R. (2012a). Family background variables as instruments for education in income regressions: A Bayesian analysis. Economics of Education Review 31(5):515–523.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Even without making use of parallelized computation, an efficiency gain is observed both under strong and weak instruments, where the gain can be enormous in the latter case.