International financial integration : a complex network analysis

06.03.2018 tarihli ve 30352 sayılı Resmi Gazetede yayımlanan “Yükseköğretim Kanunu İle Bazı Kanun Ve Kanun Hükmünde Kararnamelerde Değişiklik Yapılması Hakkında Kanun” ile 18.06.2018 tarihli “Lisansüstü Tezlerin Elektronik Ortamda Toplanması, Düzenlenmesi ve Erişime Açılmasına İlişkin Yönerge” gereğince tam metin erişime açılmıştır.Finansal entegrasyon yeni bir kavram olmadığı gibi küreselleşme de yeni bir fenomen değildir. Finansal entegrasyon; sınır ötesi sermaye hareketliliğindeki engellerin kaldırılması, deregülasyon politikaları, teknolojinin evrimi ve artan uluslararası işbirliği imkanları ile hız kazanmıştır. Yine de, dünya tamamen entegre olmaktan uzaktır ve artan sınır ötesi sermaye akışlarından gerçekten fayda sağlamayı başaran birkaç ülke vardır. Yapılan tez çalışması, uluslararası finansal ağın analiz tipolojisine ve evrimine ağ yaklaşımı ile ışık tutmaktadır. Ana veri kaynağı, IMF tarafından yayınlanan Eşgüdümlü Portföy Yatırım Anketi (CPIS) olup, 2004'ten 2015'e kadar olan dönemi kapsamaktadır. Analizde 70 ülkeye yer verilmiştir. Finansal ağ kalıplarını ve evrilmesini değerlendirmek için kullanılan ağ parametreleri: ağ yoğunluğu (network density), kümelenme katsayısı (clustering coefficient), düğüm merkeziliği (node centrality), aradalık merkeziliği (betweenness centrality), yakınlık merkeziliği (closeness centrality) ve merkezler ve otoriteler (hubs and authorities – HITS Algorithm). Bu tez çalışmasında, karmaşık bir ağ modeli kullanarak, finansal ağın haritasını çikarılması ve onun topolojisini ve emrimini analiz etmek amaçlanmaktadır. Bu tezin ampirik sonuçlarına göre, dış varlığı elinde bulunduran ülkeler artmaktadır, lakin en büyük portföy ($ cinsinden) ABD tarafından tutulmakta ve finansal ağdaki en etkili ülke olarak mutlak liderliğini sürdürmektedir. Japonya, İngiltere, Lüksemburg, Fransa ve Almanya da ağda oldukça etkili görünmektedir. Bu ülkeler büyük miktarda uluslararası çapta yayınlanmış finansal varlıklara sahiptir. Genel olarak, yapılan tez çalışmasının bulguları önceki çalışmaların sonuçları ile uyumludur. Finansal ağ merkez-çevre yapısıdır ve ağın merkezinde bulunan az sayıdaki ülke ve hem kendi arasında hem de geri kalan çevre ülkelerle finansal ilişkiler sürdürmektedir. Çevresel olarak sınıflandırılan ülkeler, merkez ülkelerle ilişkiler kurma eğilimindedir ve bu ülkelerin diğer ülkelerle bağlantı kurma konusunda daha az istekli oldukları görülmektedir.The concept of financial integration is not new and globalization itself is not a novel phenomenon. International financial integration was mainly accelerated due to removal of barriers on international capital flows, deregulation policies, technological evolution, increased international cooperation, etc. Still, the world is far from being fully integrated and international financial network clearly demonstrates a core-periphery structure. This thesis employs a network approach to explore typology and evolution of international financial network. Main data source is Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS) published by IMF and covers a period from 2004 until 2015. 70 countries are included in the analysis and sample is restricted due to data availability. Key network parameters used to assess financial web patterns and evolution are: network density, clustering coefficient, degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality and hubs & authorities centrality. Applying a complex network analysis, main purpose of this thesis is to map and explain the typology and evolution of international financial integration. Empirical results of this thesis show that while there is an increasing number of countries holding geographically diversified portfolio of assets issued by non-residents, most influencing country in the financial network is the USA. Japan, UK, Luxembourg, France and Germany as well appear to be influential in the network owning large portfolios of internationally issued financial assets. In general, this thesis' findings are in line with previous studies considering financial network as a core-periphery structure, with a small number of countries located in the core of network and maintaining intensive relation both among each other and with the rest of network. On the other side, countries classified as periphery tend to establish relations with core countries and have less incentive to connect with other countries positioned in the periphery layer. Lastly, unlike expected, global and European financial crises did not significantly change position of countries in the international financial network

HOW CRM- SYSTEM AFFECT PERFOR- MANCE OF B2B SALES STAFF OF ENTER- PRISE X

The impact of CRM on organizational performance has been widely researched within various contexts and industries. Such researches have aimed at finding out a truth con- cerning connection of such multiple organizational metrics as efficiency, received amount of customer complaints, level of satisfaction, customer loyalty, perceived value, with power of CRM (Yaghoubi, Asgari, Javadi; 2017). However, there have been only fewer number of researches targeting to identify clear connection between especially perfor- mance of sales staff and presence of CRM- system. As sales is considered to be one of the most important functions in any organization with its ability to generate cash flows, it is natural to investigate ways to improve its efficiency. Additionally, there are barely organizations without CRM nowadays and, according to author’s perceptions, CRM and sales usually go hand in hand. Rodriguez and Honeycutt (2011) have also found out that there exists a strong and obvious link between performance of sales and utilization of CRM within organization. Therefore, one can conclude that those two are tightly related to each other. As there are typically people in charge of carrying out sales tasks, it is sensible to make an assumption that CRM affects sales staff and their performance. But in what kind of way? In this research the main target is to identify impact of CRM- systems on perfor- mance of sales staff such account managers, sales trainees and senior sales professionals. The subject was shed light on in previous researches of Rodriguez and Honeycutt (2011) as well as in one by Rodriguez and Yim (2015), but this particular one will provide readers with more details by moving deeper from abstract level to slicing a typical sales process into 5 stages. Impact of CRM on each stage’s staff performance will be examinated through conducting series of interviews with sales staff of each stage. The aim of this research is to collect sales staff- based experiences and generate insights on impact of CRM on staff of each of 5 stages of sales process. The described sales process originates from Enterprise X, a firm where the author has been working for certain amount of time. The research will, therefore, introduce a case study of impact of CRM on sales process staff within one pre- selected enterprise. The best way to gather answers was to select such persons for interviews who were in charge of different tasks within sales pipeline: Sales Assistants, Account Managers and Team Managers. Those people had the best insights available on CRM’s and sale func- tions’ collaboration as their daily jobs included dealing with both. The most of them were author’s teammates and colleagues and this impacted choice too: easily approachable and experienced sales professionals have been chosen to fuel the research with relevant data. All the persons asked for interviews accepted the call and interview questions, so this didn’t require deeper moderation. More of this will be discussed in Chapter 5

Developments in Language Testing with the Focus on Ethics

Language tests have become powerful tools, because they are used to measure the success of individuals in different aspects of life. Despite their influence on the lives of individuals taking them, only in the last decades have language theorists started to raise questions of high sensitivity. Tests were considered as purely linguistic acts, therefore very little attention was paid to the social dimension of language as the most important medium of communication among humans. With the advent of integrative testing, and later communicative language testing, linguists became more conscious of the social impact that such tests have. The following article brings a general overview of the history of language testing, the questions that were raised in each phase of theoretical development, as well as further exploration of ethics in language testing. Keywords: psychometric-structuralist, gatekeeper, communicative approach, ethical approach, alternative assessment

Challenging Goliath. Informal Unionism and Digital Platforms in the Food Delivery Sector. The Case of Riders Union Bologna

The growth of digital platforms in many industries attracted the attention of scholars and activists alike. A number of studies, in disciplines such as management, emphasized the role of digital technology in transforming market logics and described platforms as the harbingers of a more democratic organization of economic activities. The more platforms became relevant in intermediating between clients and providers of services and goods, the more conflicts related to working conditions rose, calling for a critical approach to the so-called platform economy. The most recent debate focused on the connection between the rise of platforms and the effects of neoliberalism in relaxing employment regulations and in pushing an increasing number of individuals towards "gig" types of jobs. We deal with these tensions and consider the emerging forms of organization and strategies of workers' movements. We focus on the food delivery sector and on the most popular informal workers' movement in Italy: Riders Union Bologna (Rub). The aim of the paper is to investigate the factors that stimulated the rise of informal unionism in food delivery, and to pinpoint the reasons motivating specific struggling and organizing strategies among platform workers

Challenging Goliath. Informal Unionism and Digital Platforms in the Food Delivery Sector. The Case of Riders Union Bologna

The growth of digital platforms in many industries attracted the attention of scholars and activists alike. A number of studies, in disciplines such as management, emphasized the role of digital technology in transforming market logics and described platforms as the harbingers of a more democratic organization of economic activities. The more platforms became relevant in intermediating between clients and providers of services and goods, the more conflicts related to working conditions rose, calling for a critical approach to the so-called platform economy. The most recent debate focused on the connection between the rise of platforms and the effects of neoliberalism in relaxing employment regulations and in pushing an increasing number of individuals towards "gig" types of jobs. We deal with these tensions and consider the emerging forms of organization and strategies of workers' movements. We focus on the food delivery sector and on the most popular informal workers' movement in Italy: Riders Union Bologna (Rub). The aim of the paper is to investigate the factors that stimulated the rise of informal unionism in food delivery, and to pinpoint the reasons motivating specific struggling and organizing strategies among platform workers

Implementation of CAVENET and its usage for performance evaluation of AODV, OLSR and DYMO protocols in vehicular networks

Vehicle Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a kind of Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) that establishes wireless connection between cars. In VANETs and MANETs, the topology of the network changes very often, therefore implementation of efficient routing protocols is very important problem. In MANETs, the Random Waypoint (RW) model is used as a simulation model for generating node mobility pattern. On the other hand, in VANETs, the mobility patterns of nodes is restricted along the roads, and is affected by the movement of neighbour nodes. In this paper, we present a simulation system for VANET called CAVENET (Cellular Automaton based VEhicular NETwork). In CAVENET, the mobility patterns of nodes are generated by an 1-dimensional cellular automata. We improved CAVENET and implemented some routing protocols. We investigated the performance of the implemented routing protocols by CAVENET. The simulation results have shown that DYMO protocol has better performance than AODV and OLSR protocols.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Performance analysis of WMNs by WMN-GA simulation system for exponential distribution considering EDCA and DCF

(c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.In this paper, we evaluate the performance of WMN using our WMN-GA simulation system considering throughput, delay, jitter and fairness index metrics. For simulations, we used ns-3 and Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR). We compare the performance of Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) and Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) for exponential distribution of mesh clients by sending multiple Constant Bit Rate (CBR) flows in the network. The simulation results show that for Hybrid WMN, the throughput of both MAC protocols is higher than I/B WMN. The delay and jitter of Hybrid WMN are lower than I/B WMN. The fairness index of I/B WMN is a little bit higher than Hybrid WMN.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Application of JXTA-overlay platform for secure robot control

In this paper, we present the evaluation and experimental results of secured robot control in a P2P system. The control system is based on JXTA-Overlay platform. We used secure primitives and functions of JXTA-Overlay for the secure control of the robot motors. We investigated the time of robot control for some scenarios with different number of peers connected in JXTA-Overlay network. All experiments are realised in a LAN environment. The experimental results show that with the join of other peers in the network, the average time of robot control is increased, but the difference between the secure and unsecure robot control average time is nearly the samePeer ReviewedPostprint (published version