The Comparison of the Recent Crises in Turkey in terms of Output Gap

The importance of output gap and its timely measure come from the fact that it can serve as a guide to macroeconomic policy design. The knowledge of the position of an economy in a cycle is invaluable information and it has an important role in formulation of monetary, fiscal, and income policies. In this paper, we measure potential GDP and output gap for the Turkish Economy for the period between 1998Q1 and 2011Q4, using production function approach. We analyze the crises and the boom periods in terms of output gap. We find that according to the length of downturn and recovery periods, the worst crisis is the 2001. However, when we compare the crises according to the magnitude, the biggest collapse occurs during 2008 crisis. After recovering from 2008 crisis, once again the actual real GDP remains higher than the potential GDP for 5 successive quarters. Moreover, in this period actual real GDP is back on its old trend suggesting that the recovery period is over for Turkey and the negative effects of 2008 global crisis are not permanent

Determinants of Effectiveness of Stay-At-Home against COVID-19

Quarantines are basic public health policies against pandemics. The wide spread quarantines worldwide against COVID-19 have been dubbed as “great lockdown” as a reference to the great depression in 1929. While quarantines may save millions of lives by limiting the mobility of people and isolating infected individuals, they also result in massive economic disruptions. Therefore, quarantine policies must be science-based policies, which requires comprehensive knowledge about the mode of interactions among the members of the society. In addition, quarantines must be inclusive in the sense that it must treat different segments of the society equally. In case of the COVID-19 instances in the US, we observe that the effectiveness of stay-at-home measures vary intensely across the states. Therefore, we hypothesize that prevailing factors such as population density and mode of transportation might play the key role in the differences in effectiveness of stay-at-home measures. Utilizing differences-in-differences estimation methodology, we inspect the impact of changes in mobility and structural factors such as modes of transportation and population density on COVID-19 cases in the US. Our findings show that restricting mobility and implementing stay-at-home measure significantly lower COVID-19 cases. In addition, the states with lower vehicle ownership have considerably higher cases. Population density also plays an important role as higher population density causes higher infection and cases

Privatization and corruption in transition economies: a panel study

By using three corruption indices, six privatization indicators, and taking the endogeneity problem into consideration, we test the hypothesis that privatization contributes to a decrease in corruption in transition economies. We identified a highly statistically significant and negative association between privatization and corruption in transition economies for three different corruption indices and six different privatization indicators.corruption, privatization, transition economies, panel study,