Public versus Private Sector Wage Gap in Egypt: Evidence from Quantile Regression on Panel Data

Aysit Tansel, Halil İbrahim Keskin and Zeynel Abidin Özdemir


Exchange Rate Regimes as Thresholds: The Main Determinants of Capital Inflows in Emerging Market Economies

Fatma Taşdemir and Erdal Özmen

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This study investigates whether the impacts of the main common push (global financial conditions, GFC) and country-specific pull (growth) factors on capital inflows are invariant to the prevailing exchange rate regimes (ERRs) in emerging market economies. Our results suggest that endogenously estimated ERR thresholds do matter especially for the impact of GFC. The impact of GFC is substantially high under more flexible ERRs for all capital inflow types except FDI. FDI inflows are basically determined by the pull factor across all ERRs. Portfolio inflows are mainly determined by GFC. The sensitivity of aggregate and other investment inflows to the pull factor seems to be much higher under more rigid ERRs. Our results are broadly in line with the literature suggesting that credible managed ERRs encourage capital inflows by allowing countries to import monetary policy credibility of the center country and to provide exchange rate guarantee.

A Tale of Three Crises in Turkey: 1994, 2001 and 2008-09

Hasan Cömert and Erinç Yeldan

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Developing countries have encountered many economic crises since the 1980s, due mainly to structural problems related to their integration into the global economy. The Turkish economy is by no means an exception, and suffered significantly from the crises of 1994, 2001 and 2008-09. This paper investigates the tales of these three crises to shed light on the propagation mechanisms of crises and their implications for developing countries, given the Turkish experience. Our study is aiming at complementing existing studies by giving a very broad comparative picture of the main macroeconomic trends before and after the crises at the expense of ignoring many important details explained in other studies. This comparison can be also useful for understanding possible (and under current conditions highly unavoidable) implications of current developments in Turkish economy. Although there are many differences in the emergence of recent crises in Turkey, significant similarities can be found between the 1994 and 2001 crises. The crisis of 2008-09 can be considered exceptional in many aspects. The first two episodes were deemed to be mostly finance-led and finance-driven, with repercussions on the real sectors thereafter; but the 2008-09 crisis was a fully-fledged real sector crisis from the beginning, amid a direct collapse in employment and real economic productivity.

Puzzling out the Feldstein-Horioka Paradox for Turkey by a Time-Varying Parameter Approach

Dilem Yıldırım and Onur Koska

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This study would like to contribute to the existing literature on the Feldstein-Horioka paradox by focusing on Turkey for the period 1960-2014 and by scrutinizing the correlation between domestic savings and investments within a time-varying parameter approach (which is warranted especially for emerging countries due to their political and economic instability and due to the frequency of policy changes). Our time-varying parameter approach is able to capture the impact of various economic and political interruptions on the correlation between domestic savings and investments, especially the military coups in the early 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and the economic and financial crises in the mid-1990s, in the late 1990s, and in the early 2000s, as well as the financial crises affecting various countries in the globe in the late 1990s and 2000s. Our empirical analysis suggests a high correlation between domestic savings and investments in the 1960s, which was decreasing (increasing) during the 1970s (1980s), and which was decreasing since the 1990s. Furthermore, in the post-2002 era, with a further decline in the correlation coefficient, the saving-investment nexus has turned out to be statistically insignificant.

Gross Capital Inflows and Outflows: Twins or Distant Cousins?

Erdal Özmen and Fatma Taşdemir

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We investigate the long-run relations and equilibrium correction mechanisms between gross capital inflows, outflows and global financial conditions for advanced and emerging market economies. According to our results, the findings of the recent empirical literature, suggesting that twin behaviour of capital inflows and outflows resulting from domestic and foreign investors to behave as distant cousins tend to be the case for the long-run. The short-run relations, however, often appear to be consistent with the conventional theory suggesting that the behaviours of residents and non-residents do not systematically diverge from each other. Consistent with the flight to safety concerns, capital outflows from EME and capital inflows to AE tend to increase in the long-run in response to worsening global financial conditions. We find that, these results essentially hold also for the main components of capital flows.

On Barriers to Technology Adoption, Appropriate Technology and Deep Integration (with implications for the European Union)

Jean Mercenier and Ebru Voyvoda

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Based on two strands of research, namely 'barriers to technology adoption' and 'appropriate technology', we propose a formal reappraisal of 'deep integration', a broad concept often used in trade policy discussions. We then evaluate the 2004-7 EU enlargement wave utilizing this operational reappraisal. More specifically, we first estimate, using 2007 data, total labor productivity (TLP) in the 27 EU member states, and show that in all but a few sectors, new member states clearly stand below the lower envelope technology frontier of the older members in their use of skilled and unskilled labor. We interpret this as being the result of past barriers to technology adoption that are likely to be removed by the integration process into the EU, with these new counties' TLP shifting to the incumbent members' lower envelope. We then explore the potential effects on all 27 EU member states of this 'deep integration' experiment using a calibrated intertemporal multisectoral general equilibrium model. Our main finding is that, for most parameter configurations, workers' welfare in incumbent member countries is not negatively impacted despite the rather drastic improvement in competitiveness experienced by new members.

Bargaining in Legislatures over Private and Public Goods with Endogeneous Recognition

Hakan Genç and Serkan Küçükşenel

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This paper studies a sequential model of multilateral bargaining with a majority rule in which legislators can make decisions over both private and public good dimensions with endogenous recognition process. Legislators expend resources to be the proposer and make proposals about the allocation of private and public goods. We show that legislators can exert effort to be the proposer and make proposals in both dimensions depending on legislative preferences. Effort choices in equilibrium mainly depend on preferences over both distributional and ideological dimensions, as well as the patience level of legislators and the size of the legislature. We also show that in a diverse legislature, it may be possible to have distributive policies when the majority has collective desires or vice-versa.

Smooth Breaks and Nonlinear Mean Reversion in Real Interest Parity: Evidence from East Asian Countries

Abdullah Gülcü and Dilem Yıldırım

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This study aims to explore the empirical validity of the real interest rate parity (RIP)hypothesis for East Asian countries using Japan as the base country. To this end, we employ the recently proposed unit root tests of Christopoulos and Leon-Ledesma (2010) that account for both multiple smooth structural breaks of unknown form and nonlinear mean reversion in the series. Our empirical results uncover overwhelming evidences in favor of the RIP hypothesis for the whole countries in our sample. More specifically, through a Fourier approximation, it is observed that all real interest rate differentials display a mean reverting behavior around an infrequently smooth-breaking mean, with the breaks being in accordance with the financial reforms and economic crises witnessed by the countries. Moreover, the degree of mean reversion appears to vary nonlinearly with the size of real interest rate appreciations and depreciations.

Women’s education, employment status and the choice of birth control method: An investigation for the case of Turkey

Deniz Karaoğlan and Dürdane Şirin Saraçoğlu

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In this study we investigate whether women’s education, labor market status and their status within thehousehold have any impact on their choice of a birth control method in Turkey. We use the 2013 round of Demographic Health Survey (DHS) dataset which includes information about women’s education levels and occupation types as well as other socioeconomic status indicators. The DHS also reports whether women use relatively more effective modern (i.e. IUD, pill, etc.) or traditional (i.e. withdrawal) methods. In the empirical analysis, we apply multivariate logistic estimation techniques and control for women’s other indicators of socioeconomic status such as age, ethnicity, and wealth. We find that woman’s education level and urban residence are the leading determinants that explain the choice of modern contraceptive methods. We also observe that women who are unemployed, inactive or unpaid family workers are less likely to use modern contraceptive methods compared to wage-earner women.

Other-Regarding Preferences in Organizational Hierarchies

Kemal Saygılı and Serkan Küçükşenel

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In this paper, we provide new theoretical insights about the role of collusion in organizational hierarchies by combining the standard principal-supervisor-agent frameworkwith a theory of social preferences. Extending Tirole’s (1986) model of hierarchy with the inclusion of Fehr and Schmidt’s (1999) distributional other-regarding preferences approach, the links between inequity aversion, collusive behavior throughout the levels of a hierarchy and the changes in optimal contracts are studied. It turns out that other-regarding preferences do change the collusive behavior among parties depending on the nature of both the agent’s and the supervisor’s other-regarding preferences. Most prominent impact is on the optimal effort levels. When the agent is inequity averse principal can exploit this fact to make agent exert higher effort level than she would otherwise. In order to satisfy the participation constraint of the supervisor, the effort level induced for the agent becomes lower when the supervisor is status seeker, and it is higher when the supervisor is inequity averse.

Gains from Multinational Competition for Cross-Border Firm Acquisition

Onur Koska

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This study shows that when there is multinational competition for foreign acquisition, the strategic use of a consumer welfare argument in regulating foreign marketentry leads to a preemptive foreign acquisition. Even under fierce competition, foreign acquisition will emerge as part of a non-cooperative equilibrium (although multinationals would have gained more had they been able to credibly commit to a cooperative equilibrium of independent foreign sales, either via greenfield investment or trade under complete liberalization) which increases local welfare by more than both the case without foreign market entry and the case with foreign market entry via independent foreign sales.