The Impact of Financial Crises on the Informal Economy: The Turkish Case

Turkey has a large informal economy and has been hit by severe financial crises causing a devastating impact on its economy. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the impact of financial crises on the informal economy in Turkey. We distinguish between four types of financial crises that make up or aggregate financial crises: internal, external, currency and banking crises. Using vector autoregression (VARX) in the presence of two key variables (the financial crisis and the informal economy), we conduct annual time series analysis from 1980 to 2011 and estimate the response of the informal economy to each type of crisis. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study to examine the effects of financial crises on the informal economy in the context of the Turkish economy. The results show that each type of crisis produces a significantly positive response to the informal economy. In particular, the findings of this paper show that financial crises tend to have a permanent positive effect on the informal economy, suggesting that the informal economy is an important buffer, which tends to expand in times of crises in Turkey

Financial Development, Trade and Growth Triangle: The Case of India

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper aims to investigate the possible co‐integration and the direction of causality between financial development, international trade, and economic growth in India. Annual data covering the 1965‐2004 period have been used to investigate co‐integration and Granger causality tests between financial development, international trade, and growth after employing unit root tests to see if the variables under consideration are stationary. Results reveal that there is a long‐run equilibrium relationship between financial development, international trade and real income growth in the case of India. Furthermore, unidirectional causality was investigated that runs from real income to exports and imports, from exports to imports, M2 and domestic credits, from M2 to imports, from imports to domestic credits. Bidirectional causality has also been obtained between real income and M2, and between real income and domestic credits. Finally, no direction of causality has been obtained between M2 and domestic credits. This study has shown that the supply‐leading and the demand‐following hypotheses cannot be inferred for the Indian economy alone themselves. And furthermore, the export‐led and the import‐led hypotheses again cannot be inferred for the Indian economy based on the sample period, 1965‐2004. This study is the first of its kind, which investigates the possible co‐integration and the direction of causality between the financial development, international trade and economic growth triangle not only in the case of India but also in the relevant literature to the best of one's knowledge

Notes on the Merger Strategy of High versus Low-tech Industries: Complementarities and Moral Hazard

In this essay I assess the role that is played by the two characteristics of high-tech firms in shaping their corporate strategies: short product cycles and the involvement of intangible assets in production. Short product cycles impose high-tech firms to seek complementary assets for entering new markets quickly and compete. The involvement of intangible capital in high-tech production, on the other hand, is related to the distinguishing characteristic of high-tech industries for which R&D activities are observed frequently and firms employ a large proportion of scientists, engineers and technicians. In this essay, I hypothesize and show that as a result of these two characteristics high-technology firms are likely to engage in vertical mergers more often than low-technology firms and vertical mergers are likely to involve firms that employ intangible assets in production.complementarities

Size Matters (in Output-Sharing Groups): Voting to End the Tragedy of the Commons

Individuals extracting common-pool resources in the field sometimes form output-sharing groups to avoid costs of crowding. In theory, if the right number of groups forms, Nash equilibrium aggregate effort should fall to the socially optimal level. Whether individuals manage to form the efficient number of groups and to invest within the chosen groups as theory predicts, however, has not been previously determined. We investigate these questions experimentally. We find that subjects do vote in most cases to divide themselves into the optimal number of output-sharing groups, and in addition do decrease the inefficiency significantly (by 50% to 71%). We did observe systematic departures from the theory when the group sizes are not predicted to induce socially optimal investment. Without exception these are in the direction of the socially optimal investment, confirming the tendency noted elsewhere in public goods experiments for subjects to be more “other-regarding” than purely selfish.catch-sharing, common-pool resources, efficient private provision, free-riding, laboratory experiment, partnership solution

The Price Puzzle in Emerging Markets : Evidence from the Turkish Economy Using Model Based Risk Premium Derived from Domestic Fundamentals

The recent studies by Blanchard (2004) and Favero and Giavazzi (2004) imply that a tight monetary policy consistent with an inflation-targeting framework in emerging market economies could actually increase the price level due to the lack of fiscal discipline and the associated high risk premium. We extend their arguments in two ways. First, we introduce a semi structural model with time varying parameters, where the risk premium is ‘unobserved’ and is derived within the system. Such an approach fits better with the volatile nature of the emerging market economies by allowing us to track down the time-varying effects of macroeconomic dynamics on both risk premium and other related variables. Second, we obtain the impulse response functions and analyze the implications of a tight monetary policy on the risk premium. Taking the Turkish economy as our reference point, we find that the arguments of Blanchard (2004) and Favero and Giavazzi (2004) seem to be valid.Risk Premium, Non-Linear State Space Models

The Impact of Macroeconomic Uncertainty on Bank Lending Behavior

bank lending, macroeconomic uncertainty, panel data, ARCH