Financial Sector Deepening and Economic Growth: Evidence from Turkey

This paper analyzes the effects of financial sector deepening on economic growth using a province-level data set for 1996-2001 on Turkey. This period is associated with a weakly regulated and relatively unsupervised expansion of the banking sector which led to the 2001 financial crisis. Contrary to findings in the previous literature, our results indicate a strong negative relationship between financial deepening-both public and private-and economic growth. In light of the developments in the period of analysis, this result is not surprising, as the main function of the banking sector at that time was to provide financing for the Turkish Treasury, which channeled these funds to the government-albeit mainly for rent distribution purposes. However, it is important to note that the growth of private banking sector needs yet to be examined separately, as government ownership of banks may distort the development of the banking sector as a whole. Yet, it is possible to conclude that financial development may not always contribute to economic growth, and the conditions under which such a contribution takes place should be investigated further.Financial sector; Economic growth; Panel data; GMM; Turkey

Infrared Imaging of the Gravitational Lens PG 1115+080 with the Subaru Telescope

We present high spatial resolution images of the gravitational-lens system PG 1115+080 taken with the near-infrared camera (CISCO) on the Subaru telescope. The FWHM of the combined image is $0.''32$ in the $K'$-band, yielding spatial resolution of $0.''14$ after a deconvolution procedure. This is a first detection of an extended emission adjacent to the A1/A2 components, indicating the presence of a fairly bright emission region with a characteristic angular radius of $\sim$ 5 mas (40 pc). The near-infrared image of the Einstein ring was extracted in both the $J$ and $K'$ bands. The $J-K'$ color is found to be significantly redder than that of a synthetic model galaxy with an age of 3 Gyr, the age of the universe at the quasar redshift.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in PASJ(2000

Discovery of the VHE gamma-ray source HESS J1641-463

A new TeV source, HESS J1641-463, has been serendipitously discovered in the Galactic plane by the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) at a significance level of 8.6 standard deviations. The observations of HESS J1641-463 were performed between 2004 and 2011 and the source has a moderate flux level of 1.7% of the Crab Nebula flux at E > 1 TeV. HESS J1641-463 has a rather hard photon index of 1.99 +- 0.13_stat +- 0.20_sys. HESS J1641-463 is positionally coincident with the radio supernova remnant SNR G338.5+0.1, but no clear X-ray counterpart has been found in archival Chandra observations of the region. Different possible VHE production scenarios will be discussed in this contribution.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, 2012 Fermi Symposium proceedings - eConf C12102

Solar Energy Validation for Strategic Investment Planning via Comparative Data Mining Methods: An Expanded Example within the Cities of Turkey

Energy supply together with the data management is one of the key challenges of our century. Specifically, to decrease the climate change effects as energy requirement increases day by day poses a serious dilemma. It can be adequately reconciled with innovative data management in (renewable) energy technologies. The new environmental-friendly planning methods and investments that are discussed by researchers, governments, NGOs, and companies will give the basic and most important variables in shaping the future. We use modern data mining methods (SOM and K-Means) and official governmental statistics for clustering cities according to their consumption similarities, the level of welfare, and growth rate and compare them with their potential of renewable resources with the help of Rapid Miner 5.1 and MATLAB software. The data mining was chosen to make the possible secret relations visible within the variables that can be unpredictable at first sight. Here, we aim to see the success level of the chosen algorithms in validation process simultaneously with the utilized software. Additionally, we aim to improve innovative approach for decision-makers and stakeholders about which renewable resource is the most suitable for an exact region by taking care of different variables at the same time