The aim of this essay is to share a few of my observations on the global economy, especially as they relate to several of the presentations and discussions at the recent Fourth International Conference on Economics of the Turkish Economic Association (ICE-TEA 2014). In this context, my main...

Economies are often classified into polar divisions—socialist, capitalist, communist. That approach is not especially useful. Successful systems are by nature pragmatic, and they evolve into blended pragmatic systems that quickly move out of any pre-specified space. Accepting that all...

Using data drawn from the 2004 European Social Survey, we examine the determinants of the life satisfaction of employees in Turkey. The data reveal that the majority of Turkish wage and salary earners are either under- or overemployed. About half of Turkish workers have to work longer than they...

Among all the OECD countries, Turkey had the second highest average annual GDP growth (measured in constant local currency) and the fifth highest average annual growth of purchasing power parity (PPP)-adjusted per capita income between 2004 and 2012. We study the sources of this high growth era,...

This paper looks at how the macro-shock from the 2008 financial crisis has translated into income and welfare shocks in the form of reduced earnings and consumption at the household level in Turkey. Using a specialized household level Welfare Monitoring Survey implemented in May-June 2009 in...

This paper argues that the research Turkish economists do helps Turkey far less than it should, and too often it is done merely to get published and not to most effectively solve the problems that Turkey faces. It suggests two ways of dealing with such problems: one is for Turkish universities...

This paper studies the preferential tax treatment of housing that can be ob- served in many industrialized countries. It provides a rationale for it by means of an optimal taxation approach, taking into account an important feature of housing, namely its usage as collateral. In a borrower-lender...

Prof. Colander's paper will no doubt go a long way towards overcoming the first and most formidable hurdle in front of us, namely making the Turkish academic community—in the social sciences in general and economics in particular—recognize that there is a “relevance of research” problem....

This paper documents two new findings linking firm-size and gender pay gaps to informal employment using micro-level data from Turkey. First, we show that the firm-size wage gap, defined as larger firms paying higher wages to observationally equivalent workers, is greater for informal employment...

During 2008-09, as part of a wide-ranging rescue operation, the US Treasury poured capital infusions into a great many domestic financial institutions under the Capital Purchase Program (CPP), thus helping to avert a complete collapse of the US banking sector. In carrying out this effort,...