Suchergebnisse

Turkey has been going through a profound urban renewal process in the past decade, mainly based on a policy where public land is rapidly commodified by the state and used for construction projects through public-private partnerships. To some, this mechanism of state-led property development defines a new era in Turkish political economy and that the government shifted away from its earlier economic orientation defined by a commitment to structural reforms and production of exportable goods. Yet others deny the existence of such a shift and highlight that the growth rate in Turkey's construction sector is not above global trends. Despite profound public interest in the topic, empirical studies that investigate the subject remain limited. This paper aims to make a contribution in this regard and investigates how the sectoral decomposition of GDP has changed in recent years, with an emphasis on the construction and industrial sectors.

This paper assesses the effectiveness of monetary policy communication of the Central Bank of Turkey (CBT) by quantifying the information content of its policy statements released right after the monthly Monetary Policy Committee meetings. First, we quantify the signal regarding the next interest rate decision and ask whether communication improves predictability. Our findings suggest that the role of statements in predicting the next policy move has strengthened following the adoption of a full-fledged inflation targeting (IT) regime. Second, we identify the surprise component of policy communication directly from market commentaries and assess its impact on the term structure of interest rates. We find that the response of the yield curve to policy statements has become highly significant for the unanticipated changes in the monetary policy communication, especially after the implementation of the IT. We also compare the yield curve impact of the surprise component of policy decisions (actions) with the surprises in policy communication (words). Our results suggest that the relative importance of communication in driving market yields has increased through time. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]

With the global rise in authoritarianism, there has been an increase in political commentaries by the populist leaders that have criticized their central banks in favor of lower interest rates. We analyze the effects of these political pressures on exchange rates. We provide strong empirical evidence where political commentaries affect both the level and the volatility of exchange rate returns. The intensity of political pressures as well as institutional strength play a key role in determining the size of the impact.

The extraordinary steps taken by governments during the 2007-2009 financial crisis to prevent the failure of large financial institutions and support credit availability have invited heated debate. This paper comprehensively reviews empirical assessments of the benefits of those programs-such as their effectiveness in reducing bank failures or supporting new lending-introduces a combined dataset of five key programs that provided term debt or equity to banks in the U.S., and assesses the effects of such support on lending by U.S. banks. The results, using an instrumental variable approach, suggest that bank loans did not increase at institutions receiving government support.

This paper investigates the ability of the Federal Reserve to manipulate the overnight rate without open market operations (which Demiralp and Jorda (2000) term the announcement effect), using high-frequency, open-market-desk data. Using similar data, Hamilton (1997) takes advantage of forecast errors in the Treasury balance to compute the elasticity of the federal funds rate to these errors and thus to obtain a measure of the liquidity effect. Similarly, one can view daily deviations of the federal funds rate from target as forecast errors in the reserve need (see Taylor, 2000). By analyzing the manner and the type of operation the Fed uses to maintain the federal funds rate close to its targeted value and by observing the pattern of operations on the days surrounding a change in this target, we provide evidence of the announcement effect. Furthermore, we show that the discipline of the FOMC schedule dictates, not only the process of expectations formation in the overnight rate, but also the price adjustment process of term rates.