Business and Economics Research Journal

1-18

Authors: Vassy Pierre Sangare, Wadjamsse Baudelaire Djezou, Caroline Ble

The West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) is facing frequent and diverse crises that are affecting economic stability and employment opportunities in the region. It is important to analyze the impact of economic cycles on employment, as the response of employment supply differs during economic growth and contraction. This article uses a lagged non-linear auto-regressive model (NARDL) on panel data from 1990 to 2022, along with various filters, to examine the relationship between employment and business cycles. The study found that there is an asymmetric relationship between economic growth and employment, with the impact of economic recessions being stronger on long-term employment than on short-term employment. The study suggests that countries have not fully utilized their economic potential to benefit employment. To achieve sustainable economic growth and reduce the proliferation of the informal sector, economies should focus their efforts on translating their potential into action.

33-50

Authors: Alparslan Oğuz, Haluk Satır

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the financial performance of retail trade enterprises whose shares are traded on Borsa Istanbul by using profitability ratios. Within the scope of the study, the data of ten retail trade enterprises covering the period 2021-2022 were used. The weight of the performance criteria used in the study was determined by the MEREC method. COBRA method was used to determine the performance ranking among the firms. A two-stage sensitivity analysis was conducted to determine the consistency of the analysis results. In the first stage, seven different multi-criteria decision-making methods were used to rank the firms according to their performance. The consistency between the results of the study and the results of other methods was determined by Spearman correlation coefficients. In the second stage, scenarios with different criteria weights were tested. Sensitivity analysis showed that the results were stable and consistent. According to the results of the study, MIPAZ ranked first in profitability performance for both years.

445-464

Authors: M. Utku Özmen, M. Eray Yücel

This paper aims to study how people utilize (search for, choose, process, and evaluate) information provided on online domains, emphasizing the balance between context identifiers and the actual content of information and the psychological processes. The study assesses the popularity of online provided materials, TED Talks, in relation to the length of information, user ratings, and several content-related features. The paper employs a comprehensive naturalistic data set that covers the titles, duration, viewer-assigned ratings/tags, transcripts, various content identifiers, and popularity (number of views) of 2685 TED Talks. The results reveal the relevance of both content and context-related factors, as well as psychological processes, on the popularity of the talks. On the context side, using certain words in the title and the text, optimizing the talk pace and the length of the talk; on the content side, carefully incorporating rhetorical features are major factors that influence the popularity of the talks. On the psychological processes front, the popularity of talks is associated with positive emotions and anxiety among affective processes, and insight and tentativeness among cognitive processes.

479-501

Authors: Şerife Uğuz Arsu, Talip Arsu

This study aims to evaluate the corporate sustainability performance of manufacturing companies listed in the Borsa Istanbul (BIST) Sustainability Index using multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. For this purpose, by examining the literature, 11 criteria, including economic, social, and environmental, were determined and the criteria were weighted with method based on the removal effects of criteria (MEREC), one of the objective MCDM methods. According to the weights obtained through the MEREC method, the most important criteria were “return on equity”, “operating profitability”, and “asset profitability”, while the least important criteria were “employee turnover rate”, “training hours per employee” and “proportion of female employees”. Subsequently, using the weights derived from the MEREC method, the companies were ranked using the CoCoSo (Combined Compromise Solution) method. According to the rankings, the companies demonstrating the highest corporate sustainability performance are Türk Traktor, Ford, Tofaş, and Otokar, while the companies with the lowest corporate sustainability performance are Kerevitaş, Coca-Cola, Petkim, and Tüpraş, respectively. Sensitivity analysis is carried out to test the consistency of the results obtained. Although these results contribute to the literature, in subsequent studies, MEREC and CoCoSo methods can be used to measure different performance criteria of companies. The fact remains that corporate sustainability performances of companies can be measured by using combinations of different MCDM methods.

525-540

Authors: Handan Akkaş

This study examines the moderating effect of flexible work arrangements on the relationship between self-efficacy and innovative work behavior. Data were collected from 202 logistics employees working in Ankara, Türkiye. SPSS process macro plugin was used to test the moderation effect. The theoretical basis of the study was analyzed within the framework of Conservation of Resources (Hobfoll, 1989), Social Cognition Theory (Bandura, 1986), and Job-Demand Resources models (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). Within the scope of the study, the perception of flexible working was examined in two sub-dimensions as time and structure flexibility perception. The results revealed that an increase in both structure and time flexibility perception dimensions increased the strength of the relationship between self-efficacy and innovative work behavior. The study is important because it is one of the few studies that examine logistics employees despite their significant contribution to the global economy. Understanding the behaviors of sector employees is of great importance in terms of optimizing operational efficiency and improving overall performance in the sector.

303-319

Authors: Mehmet Karakaya , Seçkin Özbilen

We consider hedonic coalition formation games. A hedonic coalition formation game is a pair which consists of a finite set of agents and a list of agents’ preferences such that each agent has preferences over all coalitions containing her. We study the existence of a Nash stable partition under different membership rights for anonymous and separable hedonic coalition formation games. We prove that for anonymous and separable hedonic games, the existence of a Nash stable partition is always guaranteed when the membership rights are Free Exit-Approved Entry or Approved Exit-Free Entry, but the existence of a Nash stable partition is not guaranteed when the membership rights are Free Exit-Free Entry. We also analyze the relation of the anonymity and separability with the other sufficient conditions which guarantee the existence of a Nash stable partition under different membership rights.

351-368

Authors: Bahadır Karakoç, Uğur Arcagök

Cultural characteristics and personal values can play a significant role in financial decision-making process, alongside economic factors. This study contributes to the existing literature by investigating the impact of cross-cultural board members on capital structure decisions in publicly traded firms in Turkey. Using panel data methodology to analyze the capital structures of these firms between 2011 and 2020, we found that firms with at least 30% cross-cultural representation on their boards tend to borrow more than firms with less diverse boards. Similarly, firms with at least one cross-cultural board member borrow more than firms managed entirely by locals. These findings are significant in contributing to the understanding of the role of cultural diversity in financial decision-making and offer practical implications for firms aiming to optimize their capital structures. The results remain robust even after alternative regression specifications and other corporate financing decisions have been considered.

141-155

Authors: Emre Ekinci

This paper examines the effect of firing costs on inventor turnover using the patent data provided by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for the 1975-2003 period. The adoption of the wrongful discharge laws in the US is considered as an exogenous increase in firing costs. As states adopt these laws at different dates, a quasi-experimental setting allows us to estimate a casual effect. Using the existing holdup theories investigating the employment relationship, we conjecture that the effect of firing costs on inventor turnover hinges on the extent to which the inventor’s knowledge set is transferable to competing firms. We measure knowledge transferability by the number of co-authors an inventor has filed a patent with, his or her specialization across technological classes and reliance on the prior art patented by the current employer. Our analysis shows that these variables alter, as predicted by the theory, how increased firing costs affect inventor turnover.

199-216

Authors: Ebru Aydoğan, Esen Kara

One of the frequently mentioned issues in the literature is that studies analyzing the relationship between corporate sustainability and financial performance do not reach a consensus on the existence and direction of the relationship. This study is aimed to contribute to the literature by analyzing the relationship between corporate sustainability practices and financial performances of 58 non-bank firms included in the Borsa Istanbul (BIST) Sustainability Index between the years 2015-2021. The study employed the System Generalized Method of Moments (system GMM) estimator, which is one of the dynamic panel data models. The results of the analysis can be summarized as follows; (i) there is a positive relationship between corporate sustainability practices and both market-based and accounting-based financial performance indicators, (ii) corporate sustainability positively affects different financial performance indicators at different terms, (iii) sustainability investments affect the market value of businesses more and faster than the return on assets, and (iv) the relationship between corporate sustainability and financial performance is dynamic, and the endogeneity problem should be taken into account in the analysis of the relationship between them.

243-255

Authors: Belkıs Dilek Özbezek, Hacı Mustafa Paksoy, Veysel Mehmet Gültekin

The tourism sector generally has features such as labor intensive, simultaneous production and consumption, and inability to store the product. Due to these features, the human element has great importance and role in terms of both production and business profitability. The main purpose of this study is to examine the effect of organizational pride on job satisfaction in terms of tourism sector employees. The research was carried out by survey method on 392 personnel in five-star the hotels in Antalya region. The results of the correlation analyses showed that it was determined that organizational pride and its sub-dimensions had a positive and low-level relationship with job satisfaction and its sub-dimensions. According to the results of the multiple regression analysis, it was concluded that the emotional pride dimension, which is one of the sub-dimensions of organizational pride, has a significant effect on job satisfaction and its sub-dimensions.

1-17

Authors: Fatih Kirsanli

Corruption, abuse of public office for private gain, is mainly found to impact macroeconomic indicators adversely in the long run. In this vein, this paper investigates the impact of corruption on unemployment in Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries between 1996-2020. Utilizing World Governance Indicators (WGI) corruption data and implementing the system generalized method of moments (GMM) methodology to overcome endogeneity and reverse causality issues, the results indicate that corruption increases unemployment in all models when various variables are controlled for. The robustness checks with alternative econometric estimations (i.e., difference GMM, fixed effect, and ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions) and corruption index (i.e., Corruption Perception Index (CPI)) verify the conclusion of system GMM that higher corruption leads to higher unemployment. However, the magnitude depends on the model and specification. The results reveal that specific policies should be implemented to eliminate corruption in political and bureaucratic spheres so that the unemployment rate can be maintained around the natural rate of each country.

73-86

Authors: Gizem Dagasan, Hakan Kitapci, Eren Kilic

The high-level coordination needs of hospitals require a conscious and disciplined total quality management (TQM) to improve healthcare service quality. Besides, the effectiveness of TQM relies on how healthcare professionals perceive TQM principles and how they improve their job attitudes and performances accordingly. From this view, we aimed to examine how TQM principles in healthcare services (i.e., patient focus, continuous improvement, teamwork) affect healthcare professionals’ job performance. From the social learning perspective, we predicted that the relationship between TQM principles and job performance might differ by the locus of control (internal and external). We collected data through questionnaires from 347 nurses actively working in various departments of two different public hospitals in Turkey. We found that nurses’ perceptions of patient focus and continuous improvement positively relate to their job performance. In addition, we found that the relationship between teamwork perception and job performance differed regarding the locus of control. While teamwork negatively affects job performance in nurses with a higher internal locus of control, it positively affects job performance in those with a higher external locus of control.