The nature of the informal sector is a much debated issue. Is working in the informal sector a choice or a constraint? What is the relation between informality and poverty? Theoretically, both are possible, and in this sense, the informal sector bears its own dualism (Fields, 1990, 2005)....

Over the last decade, alongside high unemployment rates, the number of discouraged workers remained high in Turkey despite high growth rates. Moreover, the ratio of men among discouraged workers is relatively high compared with other OECD countries, where discouragement is thought to be related...

This paper studies the effects of the introduction of unemployment compensation (UC) in countries characterized by pervasive informality. We provide a simple framework to analyze the impact of UC on the allocation of workers between formal and informal activities, as well as the allocation of...

We use time-series analysis to examine bank behavior with respect to credit supply employing both banking data and other financial variables for the Turkish economy over the 1990 – 2009 period. We provide a vector error-correction (VEC) model to test for multivariate cointegration and Granger...

In this paper we use Turkish household labor force data to address a number of conceptual issues pertaining to the wage curve, an empirically derived negative relationship between the real wage level and the local unemployment rate. First, we estimate the wage curve using various definitions of...

Augmenting a Mincerian earnings function with regional data we estimate both private and external returns to education in Turkey using Instrumental Variables, Ordinary Least Squares, Quantile Regression and Instrumental Variables Quantile Regression methods. Our results indicate a median...

This paper studies the evolution of wage inequality over the last decade in Turkey using household labor force survey between 2002 and 2010. During the period between 2002 and 2004, the relative supply of more educated workers to less educated workers stayed almost constant while their relative...

In this article, I estimate the premium associated with fatal and non-fatal risk within broad industry categories, using official figures provided by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security and wage data from the 2010 and 2011 Household Labor Force Surveys. The results show only positive and...

We investigate the general equilibrium effects of minimum consumption constraints over labor supply decisions. Within a simple static model, a minimum consumption constraint modifies labor supply decisions of unskilled workers, generating the well-known added worker effect. The results of the...