Social Change and the Accommodation of Religious Minorities in the Netherlands

The toleration of religious minorities is changing in the Netherlands. In this paper we analyze three recent developments in Dutch society that are important for understanding the way the Dutch regime of religious tolerance is adjusting to 21st century circumstances. The _first_ one concerns the growing homogenization of Dutch society and the emergence of a secular and liberal majority. The _second_ is the dominance in policy and public debate of a “Protestant” conception of what religion amounts to. The _third_ development is the fragmentation of religion and its simultaneous combination into new networks and groups made possible by new information and communication technologies. These developments pose challenges to constitutional rights and principles. There are no simple solutions to these challenges, but the Dutch tradition of consociationalism, as a liberal tradition in its own right, may provide some valuable perspectives

Arbitrage Pricing Theory: Empirical Evidence from Turkish Stock Market

Financial Equilibrium models have been widely studied in finance literature especially with respect to asset pricing theories. Validity of CAPM and Preference of APT over CAPM has been interest of academia as well as professionals. This research investigates number of potential factors explaining returns in Turkish markets as suggested by Ross (1980) when presented APT. For this purpose data of Istanbul Stock All exchanges from January 1, 2003 to December 31, 2013 has been used all the listed companies have been considered for this purpose. Our results suggest that in most of portfolios made for purpose of this research has two significant factors explaining returns although most of portfolios were having three orthogonal factors. It was rare that three factors were significantly explaining returns but it was not investigated that what are those factors. Keywords: Arbitrage Pricing Theory, Factors Analysis, Principal Component Analysi

Quark mixing from softly broken symmetries

Quark flavor mixing may originate in the soft breaking of horizontal symmetries. Those symmetries, which in the simplest case are three family U(1) groups, are obeyed only by the dimension-4 Yukawa couplings and lead, when unbroken, to the absence of mixing. Their breaking may arise from the dimension-3 mass terms of SU(2)-singlet vector-like quarks. Those gauge-singlet mass terms break the horizontal symmetries at a scale much higher than the Fermi scale, yet softly, leading to quark mixing while the quark masses remain unsuppressed.Comment: 9 pages, plain Latex, no figure