Research

2025

1. NPT

   Unequal Outcomes in Unequal Times: The Distributional Consequences of Turkey’s Unorthodox Policies

   Yavuz Selim Kacmaz, Tolga Umut Kuzubaş, Islam Tarlacı, and 1 more author

   New Perspectives on Turkey, 2025

   Forthcoming

   Abs PDF

   This paper examines trends in wage, income, and consumption inequality in Turkey from 2002 to 2023, a period marked by unorthodox economic policymaking before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Using microdata from the Turkish Statistical Institute’s Household Budget Survey and the Survey of Income and Living Conditions, we document several salient distributional patterns. Wage inequality declined steadily over two decades, including during the recent episode of policy experimentation—coinciding with sustained minimum wage hikes and a rising share of university-educated workers. Income inequality also fell, though less markedly, before reversing in recent years due to widening disparities in capital and entrepreneurial income. In addition, consumption inequality rose dramatically during the unorthodox policy period, exceeding income inequality growth and driven primarily by a surge in durable goods consumption among top-decile households. These findings reveal the complex and multi-dimensional distributional consequences of unconventional economic policy in emerging markets and highlight the importance of examining inequality across multiple dimensions when evaluating policy effectiveness.

2024

1. Working Paper

   Globalization from the Sixteenth Century to World War I: Evidence from Wheat Markets

   Yavuz Selim Kacmaz and Kıvanç Karaman

   2024

   Abs

   This paper examines the evolution of commodity market integration from the late 16th century to the early 20th century. For this purpose, we compile a new and comprehensive data set on wheat prices, covering 76 cities and 16 countries across Europe, North America, East & South Asia, and the Middle East. To build separate international and country-specific market integration indices over time, we estimate a dynamic factor model that decomposes the price movements of each city into international, country-specific, and city-specific components. The model imposes an orthogonality condition to distinguish international integration from country-specific integration and hence avoids double counting. In terms of the timing of market integration, the results suggest that it started early, with gradual but meandering gains from the 16th century on, which accelerated after the 1820s. As for the composition of the gains in integration, the findings indicate that they were predominantly international rather than country-specific. In terms of the geography of market integration, the results show that northwest Europe was at the epicenter, with North America catching up in the late 19th century but the Middle East, Iberia, and East & South Asia lagging behind.

2. Work in Progress

   The Long-Term Effects of Village Institutes on Socioeconomic Outcomes in Turkey

   Koralp Kabal, Yavuz Selim Kacmaz, and Murat Kırdar

   2024

2022

1. Working Paper

   Child Sex Ratios in the Late Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1897–1965

   Hulya Canbakal, Alpay Filiztekin, Yavuz Selim Kacmaz, and 1 more author

   2022

   Abs

   This paper aims to locate the late Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey up to 1965 in the Eurasian map of ‘missing girls/women’ through a spatio-temporal analysis. Employing panel data from the statistical yearbook of 1897 and censuses from 1916 onwards, we explore regional differences in sex ratios at birth and age group 0-4 in twenty-seven Ottoman provinces in the Balkans, Anatolia and Syria, and trace continuities and trends of change within the area of modern Turkey. Our findings show that the Ottoman lands as well as republican Turkey fitted in the southeastern European pattern of high sex ratios. The child sex ratio in Turkey began to improve after 1935. In both periods, regional differences were large and sex ratios tended to increase eastwards. To examine the possible drivers of the observed patterns, we test a set of demographic, economic and cultural variables, such as population density, urbanization, labor force participation, as well as literacy and ethno-religious identity.