People

People
Professor Jülide Yıldırım Öcal
Department of Economics
Social Assistance and Employment Dynamics: A Panel Data Approach
Her recent work focuses on the impact of social assistance policies on labour force participation in Turkey. In recent years there have been increases in social transfer payments to provide disadvantaged citizens a minimum of resources for them to have a decent standard of living. Although social assistance programs are generally successful in poverty mitigation efforts, they may also have unintended consequences such as the reduction in the labour force participation rates. Therefore, it is plausible that labour supply and social assistance participation decisions may be made simultaneously. She employs a panel data model and utilize Income and Living Conditions panel data. In addition to exploring the association of social assistance program participation and employment decision, impact of education on both variables has also been explored. Empirical results indicate that the more one works, the less one participates in social transfer program, and vice versa. Additionally, age, gender, household type and composition impact decision making process of individuals.
Professor Ayça Tekin-Koru
Department of Economics
Services FDI Externalities Through the Lens of Productivity Spillovers
Attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) has a top rank on the agenda of many developing country policymakers. This is due to the anticipation that multinational corporations (MNCs) transfer their firm-specific assets (new technologies and business know-how) to the domestic sectors interconnected with their activities thereby increasing the productivity and competitiveness of the entire host economy. The economic foundation of this anticipation has its roots in positive externalities created by FDI through productivity spillovers to the domestic firms. The literature so far has focused on the impact of FDI spillovers within manufacturing sectors and produced little evidence in regards to the spillovers originating from services FDI. However, considering both the ongoing servicification or deindustrialization of economies worldwide and the growing importance of FDI flowing into the services sector (accounted for about two thirds of global FDI stock as of 2015), it is important to understand services FDI spillovers.
Therefore, the objective of her current research is to add to the understanding of externalities associated with FDI in a developing country, focusing on horizontal, forward and backward spillovers originating from the activities of foreign affiliates operating in the services sectors of Turkey. Her research exploits the unique and extensive firm-level panel data of TurkStat covering all firms in Turkey for the period 2003-2015.
Assocciate Professor Semih Tümen
Department of Economics
His fieslds of interest labor economics, migration/refugees, economics of education, development economics, economics of inequality, social networks, microeconometrics.
Assistant Professor Tekin Köse
Department of Economics
Gender Differences in Subjective Health Status
Health outcomes exhibit significant gender differences. She analyzes the gender gap in health outcomes for Turkey and the United States by employing data from household surveys. Her research methodology estimate ordered choice models to quantify the determinants of self-rated health status. The findings for the effects of socioeconomic and demographics factors on self-assessed health level match earlier results. By employing both theoretical and empirical frameworks, she extends her research to investigate whether reporting heterogeneity through individual discount rates accounts for the gender gap in health outcomes in different countries. The findings will have essential implications for the understanding of systematic differences in the self-reported health status of sub-populations. Thus, this would be influential since survey data is critical in shaping health policies for many countries.
Dr. Sezer Yaşar
Department of Economics
Political Constraints and Fiscal Policy
In her research, she mainly focuses on the effects of political constraints on fiscal policy. In particular, she is interested in governments' budgeting rules. she aims to analyze how budgeting rules are determined and their effects on the size and composition of government spending. Currently, she is investigating the level of detail of a government's budget with a theoretical approach. Considering a budget's level of detail as a determinant of the executive versus legislative control over the budget, she is analyzing its relation with different preferences for public goods in a society.
Associate Professor İbrahim Ünalmış
Department of Business Administration
Ibrahim Unalmis has publications on the role of speculative behaviour in commodity markets, responses of financial markets to monetary policy shocks, the role of gold in hedge demand in financial markets and macroeconomic policy design. His papers have been published in IMF Economic Review, Energy Economics, Economics Modelling and Finance Research Letters.
Assistant Professor Burze Yaşar
Department of Business Administration
One of her research projects is about individual’s attitude towards risk which is a key element of financial decisions such as asset allocations and insurance purchases. Understanding risk preferences is crucial for financial institutions in financial advising and formulating financial products. Extant literature analyzes how risk attitudes vary across individuals and determinants of this variation via survey and experimental data. However, research on how risk attitudes vary across different countries is limited. This research presents a threefold contribution: first, they employ an international perspective.Their data covers 15 countries and 14,606 individuals. Second, they explore variations in national cultures as a possible determinant of heterogeneity in risk taking using Hofstede cultural dimension framework. Third, their sample is diverse unlike other studies which focus on university students. Results show that risk taking is significantly higher if perception of associated benefit is higher and risk is lower for that investment in line with literature. They find that cultural differences measured by Hofstede cultural dimensions significantly affect risk preferences after controlling for demographic and macroeconomic factors.
Assistant Professor Işıl Sevilay Yılmaz
Department of Business Administration
In her recent work in progress, Işıl Sevilay Yılmaz investigates the effects of financial crises on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity. In particular, the study investigates if M&A deals in crisis periods differ in terms of volume (both quantity and dollar volume) of deals, target and bidder characteristics, cumulative abnormal returns (henceforth CAR) and deal premiums. Deals across 39 countries over the period from 1992 to 2011 are studied. The preliminary results show that financial crisis in target country affects the value generated in M&A deals and how the generated value is distributed between target and bidder shareholders. Moreover, a typical crisis affects the value generated and the distribution of value differently in developed and emerging countries. In particular, crisis time M&A deals generate more value if the target is from a crisis-hit developed country. In conclusion, targets operating in countries, which experience crisis, enjoy higher CARs in the full sample even after accounting for the differences in deal specifics.
Dr. Aras Alkış
Department of Business Administration
Explaining Price Sales Response Asymmetry
In this work with Koen Pauwels and Berk Ataman, we developed a conceptual framework based on the regulatory focus theory to analyze market asymmetries in price effects, further exploring the boundaries with the phase of the business cycle and the resilience of labor markets to economic shocks. We observe theory-consistent effects for weekly scanner data in a consumer packaged product category from a panel of grocery stores in seventeen statistical metro areas in the United States. This project offers an example for the use of consumer psychology as an identification tool to understand sales response to price promotions of brands in the market.