Corrupt Local Government as Resource Farmers: The Helping Hand and the Grabbing Hand

We study the role of tax share and transparency of governance on growth and stagnation. A local government maximizes its private benefits using two activities. The first one consists of providing local public goods that help local firms to increase profits, thus enlarging tax revenue. The second one consists of extortion. We show that there is a threshold level of local government tax share, and a threshold level of transparency. Below these thresholds, the economy will stagnate and above them, the economy will achieve perpetual growth.corruption, growth, local government, tax share.

Phish-IRIS: A New Approach for Vision Based Brand Prediction of Phishing Web Pages via Compact Visual Descriptors

Phishing, a continuously growing cyber threat, aims to obtain innocent users' credentials by deceiving them via presenting fake web pages which mimic their legitimate targets. To date, various attempts have been carried out in order to detect phishing pages. In this study, we treat the problem of phishing web page identification as an image classification task and propose a machine learning augmented pure vision based approach which extracts and classifies compact visual features from web page screenshots. For this purpose, we employed several MPEG7 and MPEG7-like compact visual descriptors (SCD, CLD, CEDD, FCTH and JCD) to reveal color and edge based discriminative visual cues. Throughout the feature extraction process we have followed two different schemes working on either whole screenshots in a "holistic" manner or equal sized "patches" constructing a coarse-to-fine "pyramidal" representation. Moreover, for the task of image classification, we have built SVM and Random Forest based machine learning models. In order to assess the performance and generalization capability of the proposed approach, we have collected a mid-sized corpus covering 14 distinct brands and involving 2852 samples. According to the conducted experiments, our approach reaches up to 90.5% F1 score via SCD. As a result, compared to other studies, the suggested approach presents a lightweight schema serving competitive accuracy and superior feature extraction and inferring speed that enables it to be used as a browser plugin.Comment: 2nd International Symposium on Multidisciplinary Studies and Innovation Technologies, ISMSIT 201

Design and implementation of interface units for high speed fiber optics local area networks and broadband integrated services digital networks

The design and implementation of interface units for high speed Fiber Optic Local Area Networks and Broadband Integrated Services Digital Networks are discussed. During the last years, a number of network adapters that are designed to support high speed communications have emerged. This approach to the design of a high speed network interface unit was to implement package processing functions in hardware, using VLSI technology. The VLSI hardware implementation of a buffer management unit, which is required in such architectures, is described

Wage Inequality and Wage Mobility in Turkey

This paper investigates wage inequality and wage mobility in Turkey using the Surveys on Income and Living Conditions (SILC). This is the first paper that explores wage mobility for Turkey. It differs from the existing literature by providing analyses of wage inequality and wage mobility over various socioeconomic groups such as gender, age, education and sector of economic activity. We first present an overview of the evolution of wages and wage inequality over the period 2005-2011. Next, we compute several measures of wage mobility and explore the link between wage inequality and wage mobility. Further, we compute the transition matrices which show movements of individuals across the wage distribution from one period to another and investigate the determinants of transition probabilities using a multinomial logit model. The results show that overall the real wages increased over the study period and wage inequality exhibits a slight increase. Wage inequality is one of the highest among the European Union (EU) countries. The wage mobility in Turkey is lower than what is observed in the European Union countries although it increases as time horizon expands. Wage mobility has an equalizing impact on the wage distribution, however; this impact is not substantial enough to overcome the high and persistent wage inequality in Turkey

Costs of trade and self-selection into exporting and importing: the case of Turkish manufacturing firms

This paper focuses on self-selection into trade by exporting and importing firms, and on the presence of differential variable and sunk costs between exporters and importers across different categories of imports. We use a rich and recent dataset for Turkish manufacturing firms for the period 2003-10.This allows us to provide a comprehensive analysis of firm heterogeneity and the connection between firm-level performance and international trade. We provide evidence on the remarkable heterogeneity across firms where only-importers (importers) perform better than only-exporters (exporters). We detect a self-selection effect for both importing and exporting firms with a stronger effect for importers. The results suggest that the nature of sunk costs varies between importing and exporting activities with importers facing higher sunk costs. Tari§s represent a potentially important source of variation in the variable costs of trading. When taking the tariffs faced by firms into account, we find that the self-selection effect associated with sunk costs is still present but greatly reduced with a smaller reduction for importers compared to exporters

Corrupt local government as resource farmers : the helping hand and the grabbing hand

We study the role of tax share and transparency of governance on growth and stagnation. A local government maximizes its private benefits using two activities. The first one consists of providing local public goods that help local firms to increase profits, thus enlarging tax revenue. The second one consists of extortion. We show that there is a threshold level of local government tax share, and a threshold level of transparency. Below these thresholds, the economy will stagnate and above them, the economy will achieve perpetual growth

Hadronic Form Factors: Combining QCD Calculations with Analyticity

I discuss recent applications of QCD light-cone sum rules to various form factors of pseudoscalar mesons. In this approach both soft and hard contributions to the form factors are taken into account. Combining QCD calculation with the analyticity of the form factors, one enlarges the region of accessible momentum transfers.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, Talk at the Workshop "Shifmania, Crossing the boundaries: Gauge dynamics at strong coupling", May 14-17,2009, Minneapolis, USA; table entry and reference update

Constraints on B--->pi,K transition form factors from exclusive semileptonic D-meson decays

According to the heavy-quark flavour symmetry, the $B\to \pi, K$ transition form factors could be related to the corresponding ones of D-meson decays near the zero recoil point. With the recent precisely measured exclusive semileptonic decays $D \to \pi \ell \nu$ and $D\to K \ell \nu$, we perform a phenomenological study of $B \to \pi, K$ transition form factors based on this symmetry. Using BK, BZ and Series Expansion parameterizations of the form factor slope, we extrapolate $B \to \pi, K$ transition form factors from $q^{2}_{max}$ to $q^{2}=0$. It is found that, although being consistent with each other within error bars, the central values of our results for $B \to \pi, K$ form factors at $q^2=0$, $f_+^{B\to \pi, K}(0)$, are much smaller than predictions of the QCD light-cone sum rules, but are in good agreements with the ones extracted from hadronic B-meson decays within the SCET framework. Moreover, smaller form factors are also favored by the QCD factorization approach for hadronic B-meson decays.Comment: 19 pages, no figure, 5 table

The effects of stress and managers\u27 behaviour on the job satisfaction and organisational citizenship behaviour of hotel employees

Hotel business\u27 organizational success depends heavily on the employees\u27 performance because of its labor-intensive structure. In the industry, levels of employees stress and manager behaviors directly affect the employees\u27 behaviors. These effects could be either negative (turnover intentions, absenteeism, deteriorated performance etc.) or positive (job satisfaction, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior etc.). This study, performed in hotel businesses, delved into investigation of managers\u27 support and feedback behaviors to employees; perceptions of hindrance and challenge stress; job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior of the employees. The purpose of this study was to determine the impacts of hindrance and challenge stress and managers\u27 support of employees, feedback and self-serving leadership behaviour on employees\u27 job satisfaction and organisational citizenship behaviour. The study collected data on a sample of 410 employees in a five-star hotels in Turkey. By using structural equation modelling to test the hypotheses, the results revealed that employees\u27 job satisfaction is negatively affected by managers\u27 support and self-serving leadership behaviour. However, employees\u27 job satisfaction is positively affected by managers\u27 feedback. It was also determined that, although organisational citizenship behaviour is positively affected by managers\u27 support, this behaviour is negatively affected by managers\u27 self-serving leadership behaviour