What Moves the Highly Skilled and Why? Comparing Turkish Nationals in Canada and Germany

Based on in‐depth interviews with highly skilled and business Turkish nationals (HSBTN) in Canada and Germany, this study aims to explore why HSBTN decide to move and whether migration policy differences among the countries of destination affect recent migration motivations of HSBTN. It mainly focuses on the reasons and rationale of HSBTN and their explanations. This study argues that the high skilled and business migrants in general and HSBTN in particular move internationally as a consequence of individual‐level gain beyond economic prospects.     

An Inclusive Treadmill? Expansion of Industrial Maize Farming and Simple‐Commodity Producers in Turkey

The growth of industrial maize farming in Turkey during the first decade of this century points to the primacy of economic development over ecological concerns at a time when global nitrogen and phosphorus flows already exceeded safe limits. In this article we focus on the relations of production as the driver of an economic sector that not only has ecological but also social costs. Through a trend analysis of maize yields as our ecological indicator, we explain how relations of production influence industrial maize farming in this period and how different modes of production (e.g., simple‐commodity producers) participate in a corporate market. A “treadmill of production” perspective argues that simple commodity producers are excluded from industrial treadmills. Our findings indicate that provinces with predominantly simple commodity production experienced significant increases in maize yields and adapted to the industrial maize treadmill. However, there is a significant difference between simple‐commodity producers and large farms that widens over the decade. Our results suggest that simple‐commodity producers are included in ecologically harmful economic practices with significant obstacles. We call for a revision of the assumed relationship between the size of economic operations and their ecological impacts in the critical sociology literature and policy approaches.     

‘q-Pareto-Scalar’ Two-Stage Extremization Model and its Reducibility to One-Stage Model

A two-stage sequential choice model is studied, the first stage being defined by q-Pareto multicriterial choice rule, and the second stage being defined by scalar extremization model. In this model, at the first stage the q-Pareto rule choses alternatives which are not only undominated in terms of Pareto comparison, but also includes into choice the alternatives which are dominated by no more than q alternatives. Since the choice set of the first-stage usually contains too many elements, obtained set is used as a presentation for the second stage constructed by a scalar extremization model. The properties of the model are studied as well as its representability to one-stage scalar extremization model.     

Lifetime of Prevalence and Risk Factors of Problem and Pathologic Gambling in North Cyprus

In this article, the results of the national survey of adult gambling behavior in North Cyprus (NC) in 2012 are presented. The aim of this study is to investigate the characteristics of adults’ participation in gambling, and to determine the prevalence of ‘problem and pathological gambling’ in NC. The population of this study was formed from all the people living permanently in NC, speaking Turkish, and within the age group 18–65. Household interviews were conducted with 966 people. To obtain data, a 30 item questionnaire prepared by the researchers and a Turkish version of the Revised South Oaks Gambling Screen were used. Prevalence rates are compared with the results of the study conducted in 2007 using the same methodology and survey form. The lifetime prevalence of participating at least once in any of the 17 gambling activities investigated in the survey was 66.4 %. 3.5 % of the respondents scored as lifetime probable pathological gamblers and 9.2 % as probable problem gamblers. Risk factors for becoming probable problem and pathological gamblers include being male, being in the 19–28 age group, having a high education level, having a job and being born in Cyprus. This study shows that the prevalence of problem gambling is high in NC and increasing gradually. NC has socio-cultural features such as a history of colonization, socioeconomic problems and high unemployment, similar to other high prevalence gambling regions, which is suggestive of the importance of socio-cultural factors on gambling behavior.     

Empirical likelihood estimation for linear regression models with AR(p) error terms with numerical examples

Linear regression models are useful statistical tools to analyze data sets in different fields. There are several methods to estimate the parameters of a linear regression model. These methods usually perform under normally distributed and uncorrelated errors. If error terms are correlated the Conditional Maximum Likelihood (CML) estimation method under normality assumption is often used to estimate the parameters of interest. The CML estimation method is required a distributional assumption on error terms. However, in practice, such distributional assumptions on error terms may not be plausible. In this paper, we propose to estimate the parameters of a linear regression model with autoregressive error term using Empirical Likelihood (EL) method, which is a distribution free estimation method. A small simulation study is provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed estimation method over the CML method. The results of the simulation study show that the proposed estimators based on EL method are remarkably better than the estimators obtained from CML method in terms of mean squared errors (MSE) and bias in almost all the simulation configurations. These findings are also confirmed by the results of the numerical and real data examples.     

Linearizable special cases of the QAP

We consider special cases of the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) that are linearizable in the sense of Bookhold. We provide combinatorial characterizations of the linearizable instances of the weighted feedback arc set QAP, and of the linearizable instances of the traveling salesman QAP. As a by-product, this yields a new well-solvable special case of the weighted feedback arc set problem.     

Simple Collective Identity Functions

A Collective Identity Function (CIF) is a rule which aggregates personal opinions on whether an individual belongs to a certain identity into a social decision. A simple CIF is one which can be expressed in terms of winning coalitions. We characterize simple CIFs and explore various CIFs of the literature by exploiting their ability of being expressed in terms of winning coalitions. We also use our setting to introduce conditions that ensure the equal treatment of individuals as voters or as outcomes.     

Marshall–Olkin distribution: parameter estimation and application to cancer data

In this study, as alternatives to the maximum likelihood (ML) and the frequency estimators, we propose robust estimators for the parameters of Zipf and Marshall–Olkin Zipf distributions. A small simulation study is given to illustrate the performance of the proposed estimators. We apply the proposed estimators to a real data set from cancer research to illustrate the performance of the proposed estimators over the ML, moments and frequency estimators. We observe that the robust estimators have superiority over the frequency estimators based on classical sample mean.