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The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth performance evaluation of funds offered by the Turkish pension system.

This paper compares aggregate fund index returns with the corresponding asset class returns, estimates a factor model to decompose excess returns to factor exposures, i.e., β return and excess return originating from residual α and analyzes persistence of fund returns using migration tables and Fama–MacBeth regressions and tests for market timing ability.

Majority of pension funds are unable to generate excess returns. Majority of funds are unable to generate a positive α and fund returns are predominantly driven factor exposures. There is evidence for slight persistence in returns, mainly due to factor exposures and funds do not exhibit market timing ability.

In this paper, the authors perform an in-depth analysis of pension fund performance for the Turkish pension fund system. The authors identify weaknesses and strengths of the pension fund industry and provide policy recommendations for a better design of pension fund system.

The COVID-19 outbreak occurred in Wuhan region of China has significantly affected the exports and production of countries. Digitalization and technological developments have increased with the Industry 4.0, and COVID-19 measures accelerated this process. In this study, the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic have been investigated on international trade and production in European countries and Turkey. Accordingly, the cointegration relations between variables were examined with Westerlund panel cointegration test. As a result of the cointegration test, it is determined that there are long-term relationships between variables. The causality relationships between variables are analyzed with the Dumitrescu–Hurlin panel causality test. Causality analyses show that there is a unidirectional causality relationship from COVID-19 cases and deaths to export, while there is a unidirectional causality relationship from COVID-19 cases to production. The empirical findings demonstrate that COVID-19 outbreak has a significant impact on production and export processes in European countries and Turkey.

Competence-Based Management (CBM) theory and research suggest that a firm’s competence building and leveraging processes are key factors influencing its competitive success. To achieve sustained competitive success, a firm’s competence building processes must continuously renew and extend the competences a firm has and can leverage. However, the ability of a firm to sustain strategically adequate levels of competence building – while also maintaining strategically successful competence leveraging – may be limited by various self-reinforcing managerial and organizational mechanisms that can arise from competence leveraging processes. In this paper we focus on certain managerial behaviors that may create path dependencies that lead an organization to become “locked-in” to its current competence leveraging processes and to neglect essential competence building, resulting in an inability to renew competences at a strategically adequate level and eventually in competitive failure.

In order to avoid such consequences, the management literature suggests that organizations must cultivate dynamic capabilities to overcome tendencies toward lock-in and to sustain ongoing competence building. This study investigates ways in which firms can maintain healthy competence building processes by avoiding lock-ins, especially those resulting from self-reinforcing managerial behaviors. A case study of successful competence-renewing processes in a home improvement retailing company helps to amplify the components of dynamic capabilities and to illustrate the insights that emerge from our study.