This paper explores the effect of personality traits on: (1) the willingness to make risk-taking decisions on behalf of a group, (2) the nature of "choice shifts", i.e. the difference between the amount of risk taken in the group context and individually. Openness and agreeableness emerge as...

Do mandatory spending programs such as Medicare improve efficiency? We analyze a model with two parties allocating a fixed budget to a public good and private transfers each period over an infinite horizon. We compare two institutions that differ in whether public good spending is discretionary...

This paper employs a pair-wise approach to examine regional integration in the US gasoline market. Using gasoline price data at the state level over a period of more than two decades, we find strong support for the view that the law of one price holds in regional markets, as more than 80% of...

This paper introduces a class of endogenously proportional bargaining solutions. These solutions are independent of the class of Directional solutions, which Chun and Thomson (1990a) proposed to generalize (exogenously) proportional solutions of Kalai (1977). Endogenously proportional solutions...

Foreign language skills represent a form of human capital that can be rewarded in the labor market. Drawing on data from the Adult Education Survey of 2007, this is the first study estimating returns to foreign language skills in Turkey. We contribute to the literature on the economic value of...

Two of the primary issues of the next Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) reform are maximum sustainable yield (MSY) and transferable fishing concessions (TFCs). The European Commission agreed on implementing TFCs under some major principles including reserving a part of total quotas for small-scale...

Instead of international agreement between Syria, Iraq, and Turkey, the best hope for sustainable water conservation in the Euphrates-Tigris river basin lies with policies that can be justified on individual and local grounds within Turkey: reducing water run-off and accompanied pollution;...

Until 2004-2008 reforms, access to health care among separate pension schemes in Turkey was very stratified. A widely accepted ranking of health services of different pension schemes in Turkey (from best to worst) was Government Employees Retirement Fund (GERF), Social Insurance Institution...

The US banking industry offers a unique, natural and fertile environment to study geography's effects on banks' behavior and performance. The literature on banks' operating performance, while extensive, says little about the influence of spatial interactions on banks' performance. We compute and...

This paper investigates the relationship between the main business cycles features and the institutional and structural characteristics of countries in which they are observed. We derive the business cycle characteristics of the individual countries using the nonparametric Harding-Pagan...