Market Potential and Regional Disparities in Turkey

Regional disparity is one of the important characteristics of Turkish economy. The paper focuses on the explanatory power of market potential on the regional differences in Turkey. Regional divergences in wages and employment are used as the proxies for regional differences. Empirical results reveal that, under various specifications, variation in market potential is an important determinant of regional differences.

The Impact of Biofuels Policy on Agribusiness Stock Prices

Corn markets are important for many industries. These include the seed, fertilizer, meat production/processing and agricultural machinery sectors, all of which are highly concentrated. Oligopoly theory suggests that corn input and field equipment suppliers likely benefit from policies that support corn markets, such as U.S. biofuels policy, while meat companies likely lose. This study investigates the impact of biofuels policy on U.S. agribusiness stock prices. Corn futures prices are found to have a structural change in November 2006, consistent with the expansion of U.S. biofuels policy support. A linear two-factor (S&P500 and corn prices) equilibrium asset pricing model is estimated on two subsamples, one before and one after the estimated change point. Conditional heteroskedasticity in stock returns is accounted for using a GARCH(1,1) model. In the more recent period, corn price increases are found to have positive effects on excess stock returns for seed, fertilizer and machinery companies, while the impact on meat companies is negative. The results may be interpreted as evidence that crop input suppliers gain from U.S. biofuels policies while meat processors lose.Biofuels policy, excess stock returns, GARCH effect, linear factor model., Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Agricultural Finance, D43, L13, Q14,

Exact solutions of effective-mass Schrodinger equations

We outline a general method for obtaining exact solutions of Schr\"{o}dinger equations with a position dependent effective mass and compare the results with those obtained within the frame of supersymmetric quantum theory. We observe that the distinct effective mass Hamiltonians proposed in the literature in fact describe exactly equivalent systems having identical spectra and wave functions as far as exact solvability is concerned. This observation clarifies the Hamiltonian dependence of the band-offset ratio for quantum wells.Comment: 16 pages article in LaTEX (uses standard article.sty). Please check http://www1.gantep.edu.tr/~ozer/ for other studies of Nuclear Physics Group at University of Gaziantep. To appear in Modern Physics Letters

The Impact of Print Media on Popular Culture: Umberto Eco\u27s Number Zero

In the book published by Umberto Eco in 2015 called Numero Zero (Number Zero), on the basis of theassumption that the newspapers are able to establish various perceptions to the public in a consciousway, he has examined what kind of interventions some popular newspaper bosses have realized for thepurpose of increasing their efficiencies in the business world within the frame of a fiction. According toEco; popular culture is not in a sudden and unexpected structure (at least from its appearance) as it is inthe cultural understanding of the modernism. By also taking the likes and demands of the wide massesit desires to be expanded into consideration, it aims a consensus between the culture producers and theculture consumers. In this way, it provides an easier and faster acceptance of the messages it sends bythe masses. However, the motivation of the culture producers has derived from the market economy. Theaimed thing is “profit”. Popular newspapers inflict, transform and even make up the news in the cause ofthis profit. Eco operates by which methods the newspapers perform these destructions and reveals theirtactics that direct the readers to certain assumptions with the quibbles. He tries to decipher the codesof the common popular perception delivered to the readers. According to Eco, “newspapers teach peo-ple how they should think; unfortunately, all we learn is fake and deformed”. Popular culture consists ofa reference made by the fake that is replacing the truth to itself as mentioned in the simulation theoryof Baudrillard, not a reality away from itself

Evaluation of Some Genotypes of Wheat (Triticum Durum L.) Under Conditions in Al Jabal Al Akhdar - Libya.

The experiment was conducted at the research farm of the College of Agriculture during the season (2019-2020) to evaluate the performance of six genetic compositions under semi-arid conditions using the green fodder. These compositions were obtained from the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), compared to the local variety "Ain Al-Faras." The treatments were planted according to a randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replications. Significant differences were observed among all the genetic compositions for all the studied traits. The variety "Ain Al-Faras" outperformed the other genetic compositions in plant height, spike length, number of grains per spike, grain yield, straw yield, and biological weight, with values of 86 cm, 9.65 cm, 61 grains/spike, 1.14 tons/ha, 10.68 tons/ha, and 11.82 tons/ha, respectively. Genetic composition 2020-741 also excelled in the trait of number of grains per spike (52.33), while genetic composition D2020-72 exhibited superiority in the trait of thousand-grain weight (63.35 g). Moreover, genetic composition D2020-4 showed a higher harvest index compared to the other genetic compositions, with a value of 12.91. The results indicated that the values of phenotypic variance were close to the values of genetic variance for most of the studied traits. The highest heritability ratio was observed for the traits of number of grains per spike and grain yield. High relative genetic advance values were recorded along with high values of specific combining ability for both the number of grains per spike and grain yield. Therefore, it is possible to infer the genetic composition through morphological data, and such traits can be considered as selection criteria for improving these crops

Price Convergence and Globalization: Evidence from Selected Countries

MENA countries have been confronted with major social, economic and political changes during the last two decades. During this period some emerging countries and transition economies also experienced similar transformation at varying degrees. The transformation of the economic system has affected not only relative domestic prices but also the gap between domestic and international price levels. The paper focuses on how deviation of domestic prices from international market prices is affected by openness in the selected countries. The difference between domestic and international price level is calculated by employing purchasing power parity (PPP). The factors that may have an effect on domestic-foreign price differences other than openness also are considered as control variables of the empirical analyses

As pharma is to people, so infrastructure is to cities

The pharmaceutical industry is a profit-making sector of the healthcare system and has grown into a self-regulating complex system over the years. Starting from the pre-clinical to clinical development of drugs to the authorisation and marketing thereof, a typical multi-national pharmaceutical company of today operates in complex ways which partly emerge from the multiple interactions within and without the company. The complexity is further given by the unpredictability of the outcomes: merely 1 out of 10 drugs that are in development are likely to be approved. The plethora of regulations by authorities such as the European Medicines Agency pose a negative feedback on this complex system which is further aggravated by the reimbursement landscape of each country, taking a toll on the innovative side of this privately funded sector.
 By analogy, infrastructure operations with distinct supply systems delivering specific critical products and services, pharmaceutical companies have become the exclusive suppliers of drugs within the healthcare system. Increasingly traditional public sector infrastructure provision has been privatised, as has national health services drug development, resulting in high levels of regulation in each, constraining innovation and profitability, hall-marks of the private sector. Just as infrastructure delivers the life-blood of cities, pharma delivers medicines for the health of individuals: both aim for public health and societal good. Failures in infrastructure delivery, such as unaffordability by the poor, match with pharma failures to provide equitably to all individuals: the poor cannot afford the best drugs. The urban sprawl in cities and the rise of informal settlements without sufficient infrastructure, can be observed in health care by the rise in use of alternative and unreliable medications by sections of the population who are excluded from pharma penetration.
 Our work studies such analogies between infrastructure and pharmaceutical companies in the hope of a better understanding of the operations of and connections with each other and inspirations about finding solutions from these two similar, yet distinct complex systems