Determinants of Currency Crises in Emerging Markets: An Empirical Investigation on Turkey

This article aims at identifying the determinants of currency crises in Turkey the period 1980:01-2006:06. Following a general-to-specific model selection methodology, a broad set of pre-selected variables were tested through bivariate logit regressions. Significant variables were then used in a multivariate logit model. Strong evidence emerged that current account balance/GDP, short-term debt/long-term debt, domestic credit/GDP, foreign liabilities/foreign assets of banks, and fiscal balance/GDP are significant with correct signs. The measures of goodness-of-fit and in-sample predictive power of the model turned out to be favorable. The resulting model correctly calls 87.18% and 73.08% of the months at 10% and 20% levels, respectively.