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This paper seeks to examine whether the characteristics of the audit committee impact the timely reporting represented by audit report lag (ARL), firm-based abnormal audit report lag (FAARL), and industry-based audit reports lag (IAARL). The sample of the study includes mostly hand-collected 2,284 firm-year observations obtained from Turkey's listed non-financial companies. Main regression results show that audit committee gender diversity, meeting frequency, and independence are negatively associated with timely reporting. Furthermore, additional analysis indicates the negative association between timely reporting and the audit committee effectiveness indexes created by the coexistence of the audit committee. Also, an interaction effect between audit committee independence and gender diversity concerning the timeliness of financial reporting has been documented. The use of fixed effects estimators and two-step system GMM estimator also supported the main results. This paper aims to provide concrete contribution to the literature by examining timely reporting in an emerging market like Turkey. The results suggest that regulatory bodies and companies should review the audit committee structure to better timely reporting and reduce firm and industry-based abnormal delays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pivetti et al. (2021a; 2021b) examined links between COVID-related conspiracy beliefs and acceptance of vaccinations in Italy and Finland in 2020. They found that moral purity negatively predicted confidence in science, whereas political orientation predicted COVID-related conspiracy beliefs. Confidence in science, general conspiracy beliefs, and COVID-related conspiracy beliefs were found to negatively predict support for governmental restrictions and attitudes towards vaccines, and positively predict perceptions of informational contamination. Finally, attitudes towards vaccines in general strongly predicted attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine. The current research seeks to replicate these findings conceptually on a predominately Muslim sample (N = 570, M age = 26.69, 69.8% females) in Turkey in 2021, when the COVID vaccines were widely available. Measures of religiosity and left, center, and right political orientations were added to the original instrument. Hypothesized serial mediational models were tested using structural equation modelling. Results revealed that left and center political orientations positively predicted COVID-related conspiracy beliefs and confidence in science. Religiosity was negatively related to confidence in science. Confidence in science and COVID-related conspiracy beliefs predicted general attitudes toward vaccines. Conspiracy beliefs predicted COVID-related conspiracy beliefs, which in turn negatively predicted support for government restrictions and positively predicted distrust in mainstream media. Attitudes towards vaccines were strongly and positively related to attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines. [This paper was added to the Special Issue on "Conspiracy Theories about Infectious Diseases" in a post-hoc manner. Online publishing allows the addition of new papers to a published special issue, thereby permitting a special issue to grow.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The civil-military relations literature on Turkey focuses predominantly on the guardianship role of the Turkish military, its interventions, and the role of the National Security Council as the main institutional mechanism of military tutelage. Yet, the existing studies lack a much-needed focus on the law enforcement or policing missions of the Turkish military. To fill this gap, this study discusses the EMASYA Protocol (Emniyet Asayiş Yardımlaşma or Security and Public Order Assistance), a secret protocol signed in 1997. Emerging in the context of political instability and military tutelage of the 1990s, the Protocol enabled the military to conduct internal security operations without permission from the civilian authorities. This paper argues that the EMASYA Protocol provided a sphere of "reformulated new professionalism" for the Turkish military, enabled it to specialize in the war against rising internal threats such as reactionary Islam and Kurdish separatism, and created anomalies in civil-military relations in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel integrated multi-criteria decision-making model consists of the CRITIC (CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation) technique and the EDAS (The Evaluation based on Distance from Average Solution) method to evaluate the selection of the urban rail vehicles operated in the public transport systems. In order to determine the selection criteria in a more realistic perspective, a board of experts consists of seven members, who perform as senior executives in the public transport institutions of the country, was constructed and many round tables meetings were organized with together the members of the board for determining the procedure to follow to reach meaningful and applicable results. At the beginning of the research, approximately fifty selection criteria were determined by the research team and some of them were eliminated during the preparation process of this study. Finally, 22 factors were determined as the selection criteria, which will be used in this research. These factors are the selection criteria directly or indirectly affecting the selection process and results. Also, rail tram types currently operated in the various cities of Turkey were determined as decision alternatives. These options were evaluated by using the proposed integrated MCDM approach. When the obtained results are evaluated, it can be seen that the proposed model has the potential to give very successful results for evaluating the selection process of the urban rail systems. Moreover, it can be implemented as a decision support system by decision-makers, who perform in the public transport authorities. Finally, it can also be applied for decision-making problems faced in the various fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A price reform in Turkey increased the residential electricity tariff by more than 50 percent in 2008. The reform, aimed at encouraging energy efficiency and private investment, sparked considerable policy debate about its potential impact on household welfare. This paper estimates a short-run residential electricity demand function to evaluate the distributional impact of the tariff increase. The analysis allows heterogeneity in households' price sensitivity and the model is estimated using a nationally representative sample of 8,572 Turkish households. The results suggest that rich households in Turkey are three times as responsive in adjusting consumption to price changes as poor households are. In addition, the welfare loss of the poorest income quintile--measured by the change in consumer surplus as a percentage of income--is 2.9 times that of the wealthiest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares several generational groups of Turkish children in Germany with respect to cognitive skills and German language skills at an early age. Empirically, children of inter-marriages outperform the other groups of Turkish children in both tests while children with a first generation mother and a second generation father score worse than all others. All group differences regarding children's cognitive skills can be explained by the families' socio-economic status and educational resources. In contrast, with respect to children's language skills also parents' endowment with receiving country specific resources ( e.g., parental German language proficiency) needs to be taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the transition to a first union of descendants of Turkish immigrants in France. We use data from the project The Integration of the European Second Generation, 2007, and apply event-history techniques. We find that descendants of Turkish immigrants who grew up in France enter a first union earlier and more often in a direct marriage than do young adults without an immigrant background. We then describe the type of union in more detail and estimate the likelihood of a transnational partner choice, that is, between a young adult born in France of Turkish immigrant parentage and an immigrant from Turkey. We pay attention to social factors such as education, city of residence, and to cultural factors such as the rules of affinity in Turkey and the attachment to the norm of virginity at marriage as factors that orient partner choice. Finally, we discuss what anthropological methods could contribute to this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkish electricity reform is entering a new phase through the Turkish Government's proposal to create 21 new distribution companies, 18 of them by merger. Two aspects of merger analysis are the operational cost savings and the potential production efficiency gains. This paper concentrates on the second aspect and uses a recently developed methodology to assess the potential effect of these mergers and whether these mergers are efficiency enhancing. This is performed by comparing the actual efficiency levels of observed distribution companies with the merger of proposed aggregated companies. The model is calibrated on panel data from 1999 to 2003 which include measures of physical capital and labor inputs, as well as customer and energy related outputs. The results indicate potential for considerable efficiency gains from the proposed mergers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of pro-Islamic politics, the eastward expansion of the EU and the invasion of Iraq have increased the Western media's interest in the only Muslim member of Nato: Turkey. Popular discussion, however, has overshadowed a lack of systematic analyses for a proper understanding of major political developments in Turkey. This paper aims to debate Turkey's state of affairs from the perspective of political economy. It will be argued that Turkey's already troubled democracy is under the threat of absolute collapse, triggered by fundamentalist and fascistic tendencies, and that the current policies of the EU nurture such processes despite the EU's pro-democratic claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]