In this paper we investigate the role of socio-economic factors like income, unemployment levels and non economic factors such as religion, identity and culture to explain the reasons for disparity of happiness levels among Turkish and Moroccan Immigrants in the Netherlands. The statistics demonstrate that Moroccans, although they have lower income levels and higher unemployment rates than the Turks, are more integrated to Dutch society and their life satisfaction level is higher than the Turks. Drawing on recent research concerning happiness, we can consider how certain cultural facts and psychological processes (e.g. adaptation, aspirations, and comparisons) might operate in counterintuitive ways for immigrants despite ostensible economic gains. In order to examine this dilemma we applied Mann-Whitney U test to reveal group differences in relation to life satisfaction levels.

The liberalization of goods and capital flows became a priority policy target with the deepening of globalization in the 1990s. Consequently, foreign direct investments also increased in the developing countries. One of the prominent arguments of the advocates of international direct investments was that these investments could accelerate economic growth. The paper discusses the relationship between foreign direct investment and economic growth focusing on upper middle-income countries. Results indicate that there is no strong relationship between foreign direct investment and economic growth.

As a long-term investor and trade partner of Turkey, Germany has significant importance for the development of the Turkish economy. The novelty of this study is that we tried to forecast the export pattern of Turkey based on the interdependency with Germany. In our analysis, we tried to explain trends in intermediate and consumer goods export of Turkey separately by including major German trade indices in the model equations. In this context, we employed Dynamic Conditional Covariance (DCC)-Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) methodology to examine time-varying correlation and volatilities of intermediate goods and consumer goods exports. We also enriched our results with News Impact Curves to understand the characteristics of intermediate goods and consumer goods export volatilities. Our first finding is that intermediate goods export is less autocorrelated compared to consumer goods export. Secondly, we found that the exchange rate has a volatility-increasing impact for consumer goods export while the same results are not valid for intermediate goods. Thirdly, goods news has a bigger effect on volatility than a negative shock of the same magnitude for intermediate goods while bad news has more impact on consumer goods export volatility. Finally, the conditional correlation between intermediate export goods and consumer export goods is high time-varying across the period of years

This essay attempts to construct an evolutionary epistemology to understand the historical evolution of general equilibrium analysis since Leon Walras’ 1874 book. The essay argues that the approaches of Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Larry Laudan are not helpful in jointly understanding punctuations and continuity in the historical evolution. An evolutionary epistemology that sees science as an adaptive complex system, that does not require scientists to be rational, and that is naturalist, unlike a priori epistemologies, provides us with new clues to make sense of both the dual evolution of general equilibrium analysis and the general equilibrium economist, and the state of mainstream economics in the 21st century.

The death of a parent in childhood is one of the most tragic events a child can experience. In this paper, we use three rounds of the Turkey Demographic Health Survey (DHS) and investigate whether children’s schooling is negatively affected due to paternal death. We find that paternal orphans fare worse in three out of the four outcomes considered. While father’s death does not affect whether the child ever attends school, it reduces the likelihood of 5th and 8th grade completion. By age 15-18, paternal orphans complete 0.41 years less schooling as compared to non-orphans.