Where do individuals choose to hold capital? Using what class of assets? What does their strategy achieve? Typical answers almost unanimously show that the international allocation of capital depends on the institutional and regulatory context, and observed investment does not seem to achieve much by way of diversification. The extent of international risk sharing appears to remain limited, and, according to Lewis (1996), largely driven by de jure restrictions to international capital flows. We argue that these conclusions, while true, obscure empirical regularities implying conditional relations between the regulatory environment, institutions, the composition of international investment portfolio, and the extent of risk sharing.
Our purpose is to improve in two dimensions the conventional test of international consumption risk sharing introduced by Lewis (1996). First, do diversification gains depend on the magnitude and the composition of international investment across various asset classes? If differences exist, why do they arise? Second, can one use information on bilateral capital flows to investigate the extent of risk insurance between pairs of countries? This provides an attractive alternative to considering the multilateral problem faced by a small open economy, especially when data on bilateral financial linkages are becoming readily available.
The paper attempts to determine whether there are significant gender differences in academic performance among undergraduate students at Middle East Technical University (METU), which is a large public university in Turkey, and if so, the factors that give rise to these differences. Academic performance is affected by a host of factors. These include individual and household characteristics such as student ability, motivation, the quality of secondary education obtained and the like.
The gender of the student may also be a factor in determining student performance. Childhood training and experience, gender differences in attitudes, parental and teacher expectations and behaviors, differential course taking and biological differences between the sexes may all be instrumental in giving rise to gender differences in achievement (Feingold, 1988). The rather high gender disparity in various spheres of public life and the patriarchal social structure in Turkey may also lead to poorer academic performance among female university students.
The growing presence of foreign-owned financial institutions during the 1990s is one of the most striking structural changes in the financial systems of the countries in transition. Currently, on average 60 per cent of the total number of banks is in foreign hands. In some Central Eastern European (CEE), South Eastern European (SEE) and Baltic countries, the share of foreign bank assets relative to total assets of the banking system is even more than 75% (Bol et al., 2002). This ‘takeover’ has occurred within a period of less than ten years. Given the high and growing share of foreign bank ownership, there is a growing need for studies on the reasons for foreign bank entry in transition economies.
The existing literature on foreign bank entry mainly deals with Western European countries, or with the US (Buch, 2000). There are only a few studies focusing on transition economies, but they only consider one country, or a small group of countries (e.g. Galac and Kraft, 2000, for Croatia, and Konopielko, 1999, for the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland).
