Corporate Governance and Implications for Minority Shareholders in Turkey

This paper reports on the ownership and control structures of publicly listed firms in Turkey using data from 2001. While holding companies and non-financial firms are the most frequent owners at the direct level, families ultimately own more than 80 percent of all publicly listed firms in Turkey. Pyramids and dual class shares are common devices that families use to separate their cash-flow rights from control rights. We also show that such deviations result in significantly lower market to book ratios suggesting large agency costs because of the conflict of interests between controlling families and minority shareholders.Ownership Structure, Corporate Governance, Business Groups, Family Ownership, Turkey

Analysis of Different Urban Forms in Istanbul

Istanbul has a very rich urban structure due to its historical background as being the capital of three empires. Since urban design has a long tradition of emanating from the past, it can be very stimulating to investigate the urban structure of Istanbul in different locations with different locational, historical and socia-economic background. With this respect Istanbul presents a rich urban structure to reweal the relationships among the different urban characteristics for the urban designers. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate building density with respect to population density, road surface ratio, urban block areas, distance to central business district, to the subcenters and to the sea shores in Istanbul. Multiple regression analysis is used as the research method. Building density is taken the dependent variable and the others independent variables of the analysis. According to the results of the analysis, building density of the neighborhoods is a function of distance to central business district, road surface ratio, urban block area and distance to the sea shore. There is no relationship between the building density and distance to subcenters. Thus, the distribution of density has a wide spectrum within the city depending on the changing life styles, income, history and amenities. The results of the study can be useful for urban planners, urban designers, policy makers, and transportation planners. For further research, it is suggested to investigate the relationship between building density and environmental control.

A proposed risk model and a GIS framework for hazardous materials transportation

This paper presents a Geographical Information System (GIS) based risk assessment model for road transportation of hazardous materials (hazmat). Existing and proposed risk models are applied to truck shipments of hazmat through the road network of Istanbul. Our empirical analysis on the Istanbul road network points out that different risk models usually select different routes between a given origin-destination pair. In this study, we propose a new risk assessment model named as ldquotime-based risk modelrdquo for hazmat transportation. We speculate that the proposed model is the most suitable one for the city of Istanbul and alike

A Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Bi-Criteria Warehouse Location Problem

The uncapacitated warehouse location problem (UWLP) is one of the widely studied discrete location problems, in which the nodes (customers) are connected to a number (w) of warehouses in such a way that the total cost, yields from the dissimilarities (distances) and from the fixed costs of the warehouses is minimized. Despite w is considered as fixed integer number, the UWLP is NP-hard. If the UWLP has two or more objective functions and w is an integer variable, the UWLP becomes more complex. Large size of this kind of complex problems can be solved by using heuristic algorithms or artificial intelligent techniques. It’s shown that Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) which is one of the technique of artificial intelligent techniques, has achieved a notable success for continuous optimization, however, PSO implementations and applications for combinatorial optimization are still active research area that to the best of our knowledge fewer studies have been carried out on this topic. In this study, the bi-criteria UWLP of minimizing the total distance and total opening cost of warehouses. is presented and it’s shown that promising results are obtained.Warehouse Location Problem, Particle Swarm Optimization, Discrete Location Problems, Bi-criteria.

The gender wage gap in top corporate jobs is still there

We investigate the gender wage gap in top corporate jobs for the years 2000 till 2004. Using data from the OSIRIS database, we ¯nd that female managers receive 24.0 percent less in total compensation (salary, bonuses, other payments and exer- cised stock options) than their male colleagues. When we control for personal, ¯rm and industry characteristics, this di®erence reduces to 15.9 percent. Controlling for occupational segregation, i.e. \glass ceiling", reduces the di®erence to 6.0 percent. Additional results that fully consider the role of stock option indicate a 9.0 to 12.1 percent di®erence. These results suggest that the main sources of the gender wage gap in top corporate jobs are occupational segregation and a di®erent endowment of male and female managers with stock options.

How Effective is European Merger Control?

This paper applies a novel methodology to a unique dataset of large concentrations during the period 1990-2002 to assess merger control’s effectiveness. By using data gathered from several sources and employing different evaluation techniques, we analyze the economic effects of the European Commission’s (EC) merger control decisions and distinguish between blockings, clearances with commitments (either behavioral or structural), and outright clearances. We run an event study on merging and rival firms’ stocks to quantify the profitability effects of mergers and merger control decisions. We back up our results and methodology by using alternative measures for the merger’s profitability effects based on balance sheet data and obtain consistent results. Our findings suggest that outright blockings solve the competitive problems generated by the merger. Remedies are not always effective in solving the market power concerns, at least not on average. Nevertheless, both structural (divestitures) and behavioral remedies do help restore effective competition when correctly applied to anticompetitive mergers during the first investigation phase. Yet, they are on the whole ineffective or even detrimental when applied after the second investigation phase. Finally, remedies - especially behavioral ones - seem to constitute a rent transfer from merging firms to rivals when mistakenly applied to pro-competitive mergers

EU Merger Remedies: A Preliminary Empirical Assessment

Mergers that substantially lessen competition are challenged by antitrust authorities. Instead of blocking anticompetitive transitions straight away, authorities might choose to negotiate with the merging parties and allow the transactions to proceed with modifications that restore or preserve the competition in the involved markets. We study a sample of 167 mergers that were under the European Commission’s scrutiny from 1990 to 2002. We use an event study methodology to identify the potential anticompetitive effects of mergers as well as the remedial provisions on these transactions. Stock market reactions around the day of the merger’s announcement provide information on the first question, whereas the stock market reactions around the commission’s final decision day convey information about the outcome of the bargaining process between the authority and the merging parties. We first classify mergers according to their effects on competition and then we develop hypotheses on the effects that remedies are supposed to achieve depending on the merger’s competitive outcome. We isolate several stylized facts. First, we find that remedies were not always appropriately imposed. Second, the market seems to be able to predict remedies’ effectiveness when applied in phase I. Third, the market also seems able to produce a good prior to phase II’s clearances and prohibitions, but not to remedies. This can be due either to a measurement problem or related to the increased merging firms’ bargaining power during the second phase of the merger review