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.     

Dummy Endogenous Variables in Weakly Separable Models

In this paper, we consider the nonparametric identification and estimation of the average effect of a dummy endogenous regressor in models where the regressors are weakly but not additively separable from the error term. The model is not required to be strictly increasing in the error term, and the class of models considered includes limited dependent variable models such as discrete choice models. Conditions are established conditions under which it is possible to identify the average effect of the dummy endogenous regressor in a weakly separable model without relying on parametric functional form or distributional assumptions and without the use of large support conditions.     

A Perception Survey for the Evaluation of Urban Quality of Life in Kocaeli and a Comparison of the Life Satisfaction with the European Cities

Studies on urban quality of life (QoL) have been attracting lots of attention from various countries due to the deterioration of urban environment and decrease of the urban QoL. These studies that have been supported by international organizations such as United Nations, World Bank, OECD, European Commission and EUROSTAT (European Statistics) involve comparative assessment of life satisfaction in the European cities and comparing cities facilitate the exchange of experiment and improve the quality of local policies. The main objective of this study is to measure the local perceptions of QoL in Kocaeli, which is one of the important industrial cities of Turkey and compare the life satisfaction with the European cities. Generally, two different types of indicators have been used: objective and subjective indicators. The objective indicators cover five fields: socio-economic aspects, participation in civic life, education and training, environment and culture, and leisure. The subjective indicators are mainly for valuation of QoL perceptions in a city. In this research, a perception survey will be carried out to measure the local perceptions of QoL in Kocaeli. This survey will present on issues for which the residents in the Kocaeli had widely diverging opinions: employment opportunities, housing costs, safety, cleanliness of city, public transport, air quality and overall satisfaction with the QoL of their city. Thus, the study will become a major reference for local officials to improve QoL in Kocaeli and contribute to researches on QoL in cities.     

Communication With Unknown Perspectives

Consider a group of individuals with unobservable perspectives (subjective prior beliefs) about a sequence of states. In each period, each individual receives private information about the current state and forms an opinion (a posterior belief). She also chooses a target individual and observes the target's opinion. This choice involves a trade‐off between well‐informed targets, whose signals are precise, and well‐understood targets, whose perspectives are well known. Opinions are informative about the target's perspective, so observed individuals become better understood over time. We identify a simple condition under which long‐run behavior is history independent. When this fails, each individual restricts attention to a small set of experts and observes the most informed among these. A broad range of observational patterns can arise with positive probability, including opinion leadership and information segregation. In an application to areas of expertise, we show how these mechanisms generate own field bias and large field dominance.     

Likelihood ratio procedures and tests of fit in parametric and semiparametric copula models with censored data

Copula models for multivariate lifetimes have become widely used in areas such as biomedicine, finance and insurance. This paper fills some gaps in existing methodology for copula parameters and model assessment. We consider procedures based on likelihood and pseudolikelihood ratio statistics and introduce semiparametric maximum likelihood estimation leading to semiparametric versions. For cases where standard asymptotic approximations do not hold, we propose an efficient simulation technique for obtaining p-values. We apply these methods to tests for a copula model, based on embedding it in a larger copula family. It is shown that the likelihood and pseudolikelihood ratio tests are consistent even when the expanded copula model is misspecified. Power comparisons with two other tests of fit indicate that model expansion provides a convenient, powerful and robust approach. The methods are illustrated on an application concerning the time to loss of vision in the two eyes of an individual.     

Children's disaster knowledge,risk perceptions,and preparedness: A cross-country comparison in Nepal and Turkey

While children are one of the groups at risk in disasters, they can also take an active part in disaster management, provided that the opportunity is given. This research examined the effect of disaster experience, disaster education, country, and city socioeconomic status on children's perceived risk and preparedness with a survey of 1335 children between 11 and 14 years old, in Nepal and Turkey. The survey used questionnaires and the pictorial representation of illness and self measure (PRISM) tool. Results showed that (1) children's risk perceptions were in line with their country-specific objective risks; (2) there were differences between the countries in relation to perception of risk for all the hazards except wildfire; (3) socioeconomic status had a statistically significant effect on children's perceptions of risk and preparedness for earthquakes, wildfires, that is, children who live in wealthier places had higher perceived risk and preparedness; (4) children in both countries showed similar trends in their knowledge of the correct protective actions to take in the event of a hazard occurrence. However, there is still room to enhance children's knowledge, in terms of safety behaviors, as the children selected many incorrect protective actions. There are important implications in terms of child-centered disaster management which hopefully will make life safer and help to create more resilience to disaster in society as a whole.     

Conceptualising Euro-Islam: managing the societal demand for religious reform

Political, public and academic debates about the need for a ‘Euro-Islam’ as a necessary condition for the full integration of Muslim are widespread and strong. For Muslims and Muslim organisations in particular, Euro-Islam can be understood as subverting the very nature of their religious identity, making change or reform impossible. This raises the question as to how Muslim organisations reject the idea of the need for a Euro-Islam by construing the core of their faith as not being contradictory with Western values, norms and beliefs. The current study examines this question amongst two major Turkish Muslim organisations (Milli Görü? and Fethullah Gülen) in the Netherlands and Germany. The analysis shows that in managing the demand for reform a distinction was made between Islam as a belief system and Muslims as a group of people, between religion and culture as two types of belief systems and between politics and the true nature of the West.     

Bargaining without a Common Prior—An Immediate Agreement Theorem

In sequential bargaining models without outside options, each player's bargaining power is ultimately determined by which player will make an offer and when. This paper analyzes a sequential bargaining model in which players may hold different beliefs about which player will make an offer and when. Excessive optimism about making offers in the future can cause delays in agreement. The main result states that, despite this, if players will remain sufficiently optimistic for a sufficiently long future, then in equilibrium they will agree immediately. This result is also extended to other canonical models of optimism.     

Support Needs of the Survivors of the August 17, 1999 Earthquake in Turkey

This paper aims to present a sociological analysis of social supportrelated to disaster sociology in general and earthquakes specifically.The analysis is based on field research conducted a year after the17 August 1999 East Marmara Earthquake where 18000 people died;50000 people injured; 5000 buildings collapsed and 340000 of themdamaged; 14513 businesses closed; 150000 people became unemployed;and 129338 forced to live in prefabricated houses. The researchprimarily aims to understand the support needs by focusing mainlyon the following issues about the earthquake survivors: (i) whichand what support types and areas are mostly desired by them; (ii)which independent variables are the most effective on their demands;and (iii) from which persons or institutions they have receivedsupport and wanted to be supported by. Marginal development of thecivil society; high degree of expectations of almost everythingfrom the state; psychological factors being less influentialcompared with West and education being the primary influentialfactor are some of the significant results of this research.     

Performances of some goodness-of-fit tests for sampling designs in ranked set sampling

In this study, we consider different sampling designs of ranked set sampling (RSS) and give empirical distribution function (EDF) estimators for each sampling designs. We provide comparative graphs for the EDFs. Using these EDFs, power of five goodness-of-fit tests are obtained by Monte Carlo simulations for Tukey's g–h distributions under RSS and simple random sampling (SRS). Performances of these tests are compared with the tests based on the SRS. Also, critical values belong to these tests are obtained for different set and cycle sizes.