The impact of economic policy uncertainty on stock returns of Turkish tourism companies

Economic policy uncertainty (EPU) has various implications for financial markets. This study examines the effects of EPU on stock prices of listed tourism companies in Turkey for the time period of 2002–2013. We show that EPU in Europe and Turkey has significant negative effects on tourism index returns. The finding reflects that stock returns of the Turkish tourism companies apparently depend on domestic and international economic uncertainty. Among the included macroeconomic variables, consumer confidence index is the only factor which has an impact on stock returns.     

Effects of cultural institutes on bilateral trade and FDI flows: Cultural diplomacy or economic altruism?

The number of cultural institutes from major developed and developing countries increased significantly in the last twenty years. In this paper, using cross-sectional and panel data analysis on bilateral trade in goods and services, and FDI inflows and outflows, we examine the economic effects of 1,266 cultural institutes from China, France, Germany, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and UK for the period of 1990–2015. The empirical results suggest that cultural institutes have significantly positive trade and FDI enhancing effects, which are persistent over time. However, these effects are most robust only with goods exports and FDI outflows. Furthermore, the economic effects of cultural institutes are not homogenous across destinations and are the strongest for developed rather than developing host countries. There is also significant heterogeneity among cultural institutes with significant differences in their economic effects on different types of bilateral trade and FDI flows.     

Financial liberalization,private investment and portfolio choice: Financialization of real sectors in emerging markets

Using firm level panel data, we analyze the impacts of rates of return gap between financial and fixed investments under uncertainty on real investment performance in three emerging markets, Argentina, Mexico and Turkey. Employing a portfolio choice model to explain the low fixed investment rates in developing countries during the 1990s, we suggest that rather than investing in irreversible long-term fixed investments, firms may choose to invest in reversible short-term financial investments depending on respective rates of returns and the overall uncertainty in the economy. The empirical results show that increasing rates of return gap and uncertainty have an economically and statistically significant fixed investment reducing effect while the opposite is true with respect to financial investments.     

Consumers as legitimating agents: How consumer‐citizens challenge marketer legitimacy on social media

Previous research has shown that consumers increasingly challenge the legitimacy of marketers and unsolicited marketing communication in online contexts. Based on a qualitative study, this article examines how and for what reasons consumers challenge marketer legitimacy—the perceived appropriateness of marketers and their activities—in the empirical context of Reddit, a popular social news and community website. The study suggests that consumers challenge or accept marketer legitimacy in online communities based on particular, community and situation specific, legitimacy criteria that reflect and reproduce the values and norms of the community. In doing so, it is argued, consumers play a role as legitimating agents—consumer‐citizens that have the power to confer or deny legitimacy in the context of business‐society relations. Overall, the study advances knowledge in the field of consumer studies in two ways. First, it builds a symbolic interactionist perspective on consumer‐citizens as legitimating agents who enact their active citizenship role in the marketplace by assessing and constructing marketer legitimacy in online communities. Second, it offers an empirically grounded account of how and for what reasons consumer‐citizens challenge or accept the legitimacy of marketers and unsolicited marketing communication in online communities.     

The determinants of Turkey's exports to Islamic countries: The impact of political risks

Using the traditional gravity model, this paper aims to analyze the determinants of Turkish exports to 43 Islamic Development Bank member countries for the period from 1996 to 2015. The paper specifically investigates the effects of 12 political risk measures (bureaucracy quality, corruption, democratic accountability, government stability, internal and external conflict, investment profile, law and order, military in politics, religious and ethnic tensions, and socioeconomic conditions) in the importing countries on the total volume of exports of Turkey. After implementing various robustness checks, the paper finds that the government instability in the importing countries is negatively associated with the Turkish exports.