Distributive politics and regional development: assessing the territorial distribution of Turkey’s public investment

Turkey is often perceived as a country with low bureaucratic capacity and prone to political manipulation and ‘pork-barrel’. This article tests whether this is the case, by analysing the extent to which politics, rather than equity and efficiency criteria, have determined the geographical allocation of public investment across the 81 provinces of Turkey between 2005 and 2012. The results show that although the Turkish government has indeed channelled public expenditures to reward its core constituencies, socioeconomic factors remained the most relevant predictors of investment. Moreover, in contrast to official regional development policy principles, we uncover the concentration of public investment in areas with comparatively higher levels of development. We interpret this as the state bureaucracy’s intentional strategy of focussing on efficiency by concentrating resources on ‘the better off among the most in need’

Nurses' perceptions of aids and obstacles to the provision of optimal end of life care in ICU

Contains fulltext : 172380.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access

A multi-period stochastic portfolio optimization model applied for an airline company in the EU ETS

This paper aims to set up and solve a multi-period stochastic portfolio optimization model from an airline company's point of view, considering all the specific European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) regulatory, managerial and trading constraints (i.e. physical constraints). Our contribution to existing academic literature is multiple. As the first ever case, we apply this technique to the aviation sector, a newly included sector within the EU ETS. More than mainly incorporating physical and technical ('engineering') features and focusing on short-term planning issues, we particularly address financial features and focus on mid-term planning issues. Therefore, instead of using spot prices, we run Monte Carlo simulations of correlated geometric Brownian motions (GBM) for traded futures prices of various emission allowance types for different CO2 delivery time periods. We thereby specifically refer to the existing exchange-traded emission allowance types EU Emission Allowance (EUA) and Certified Emission Reduction (CER). By implementing actually valid and real-world-oriented regulatory constraints for EU ETS, namely managerial and trading constraints, our model implies a real-life application. We also highlight the possibility of banking and borrowing of emission allowances between CO2 compliance periods, which is a crucial regulatory feature of EU ETS