Inflation Target Credibility: Do the Financial Markets Find the Targets Believable?

We investigate the credibility of inflation targeting (IT) central banks (CBs) by estimating perceived inflation targets of the financial markets. We calculate financial markets’ beliefs about the inflation targets of 24 IT countries. Then, we analyse whether the financial markets’ beliefs about inflation targets match the announced targets. We conclude that the perceived upper bound of the inflation target is significantly higher than the announced one in many countries. Additionally, the perceived target band is narrower and asymmetric around the mid‐point of the target for most CBs. We examine the implications of these findings and find that IT CBs are more likely to miss their targets when the perceptions of the financial markets are higher than the announced IT targets. These results indicate that IT CBs should pay attention to the perceptions of the announced targets when implementing policy actions.     

Application fee manipulations in matching markets

In some well-known hospital–intern type of matching markets, hospitals impose mandatory application fees on internship applicants to consider their applications. Motivated by this real-life phenomenon, we study the application fee overreporting incentives of hospitals in centralized matching markets by assuming that interns have finite budgets to spend on such fees. Our main theorem shows that no stable mechanism is immune to application fee manipulations. Interestingly, under any stable rule, hospitals might not only obtain better matchings but also increase their application fee revenues through overreporting their application fees. In the restricted domains in which either side has homogeneous preferences or each hospital has only one available position, every stable mechanism turns out to be immune to application fee overreportings.     

‘Work always wins’: client colonisation,time management and the anxieties of connected freelancers

This article focuses on ‘connected freelancers’ as a category of teleworkers and examines the pressures placed on their work‐home balance by their relationship with clients. Based on diaries, questionnaires and interviews, it reveals that, while connected freelancers do not generally work excessively long hours, they do work irregular hours. This is because ‘work always wins’ in a conflict with domestic commitments, a phenomenon the article dubs ‘client colonisation’. Client colonisation was a source of anxiety for respondents, who found themselves continually thinking about the current and future projects on which their livelihoods depend. The article illustrates the porous ways in which they interleave work with non‐work activities and contrasts traditional ‘monochronic’ forms of work with emerging ‘polychronic’ forms, which erode work‐home boundaries. It concludes that a new model of work—one in which individual patterns of control over work‐home balance are paramount—already coexists alongside traditional models but is still insufficiently socially understood and accepted.     

Continuity and Change in Public Policy: Redistribution,Exclusion and State Rescaling in Turkey

This article discusses potential reasons for the continuities in the broader policy agendas of capitalist states, despite radical shifts in economic policies, by employing the state‐rescaling framework. Its main thrust is that, even though centrally designed policy programs mainly aim to give direction to the dynamics of the market economy, the institutional (re)structuring needed to operationalize such policy measures has been shaped around a politics of redistribution, a product both of the exclusionary results of past policies and the negative results of the newly introduced policy programs. This dialectical tension turns state rescaling into a political exercise in solving, and reproducing, ‘systemic crises’. The article examines the history of state rescaling in Turkey to develop these arguments.     

Parliamentary election cycles and the Turkish banking sector

This paper analyzes the effects of parliamentary election cycles on the Turkish banking system. Using annual bank-level data representing all banks in Turkey during 1963–2007, we present evidence of meaningful differences in the structure of bank assets, liabilities and financial performance across different stages of the parliamentary election cycle. However, we find that government-owned banks’ behavior does not meaningfully differ from that of either domestic and foreign-owned private-sector banks before, during or after elections. Our estimates also show that government-owned banks underperform both domestic and foreign-owned private-sector counterparts.     

Internationalisation,growth and pay inequality: a cointegration analysis for Turkey, 1970–2007

The nature of the internationalisation-growth-inequality nexus is very complex; and therefore, not surprisingly, there is no consensus on whether increasing openness to trade leads to higher inequality or not – in fact, there is even no full understanding on the impact of the openness on the economic growth. In the case of Turkey it is observed that there is relatively little empirical work that addresses the issue of inequality. Considering this fact, the study aims to provide some more evidence on the complex relationship between trade openness, foreign direct investment, economic growth and pay inequality by utilising a combination of different Theil Indices of pay inequality. The paper utilises the Johansen Cointegration and Granger Causality methods. Our findings yield that higher economic growth resulting from trade openness comes with higher pay inequality.     

Sticky Information Phillips Curves: European Evidence

We estimate the Sticky Information Phillips Curve model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, while in Italy, about once each 6 months.     

Monetary transmission with multiple policy rates: evidence from Turkey

Quantitative easing policies have led to persistent divergence between officially announced policy rates and short-term money market rates in many economies, making it challenging to assess the stance of monetary policy in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Lack of data variation in short-term interest rates across time dimension has made it difficult to identify the monetary transmission mechanisms. In order to shed some light on this topic, we make advantage of a specific period from Turkey during which the central bank deliberately allowed the policy rates to diverge frequently from the interbank rates due to capital flow management purposes. Using bank-level flow data from this episode, we investigate the relationship between various short-term interest rate measures and bank loan/deposit rates through panel estimation methods. Our findings suggest that interbank rates are more relevant than central bank’s officially announced rates for the transmission of monetary policy when the two diverge from each other persistently. Interbank rates particularly play a key role in the pricing of loans and deposits. These findings provide helpful guidance for evaluating the monetary stance under unconventional policies.     

Business process management in hotels: with a focus on delivering quality guest service

Quality & Quantity - In this study business process management as a tool of improvement service quality is introduced and it is examined that how it can be used to improve service quality in...     

Tradable and non-tradable expenditure and aggregate demand for imports in an emerging market economy

Using an assumption of non-separability of non-tradable expenditure from imports, this paper examines the impact of the structural transformation undertaken after 2001 on imports and, in turn, the current account stance of Turkey. In this regard, an import demand function is derived under the assumption of non-separability, and is estimated using quarterly time series data from Turkey. The empirical results show that the assumption of non-separability cannot be rejected in the case of Turkey and the relative prices of non-tradable and tradable goods must be among the determinants of import demand in addition to the relative price of imports and real GDP. This result accordingly implies that recent increases in import expenditure are, to some extent, due to changes in the relative price structure in favour of non-tradable goods.