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With the global rise in populism over the last decade, there has been an increase in political commentaries (PC) by leaders that criticize their central banks and argue for lower interest rates. We analyse the effects of PCs on exchange rates, bond yields, and the risk premium for six countries that are subject to political pressures. Utilizing a specification with time‐varying parameters, we show that PCs affect the level and the volatility of exchange rates, bond yields and the risk premium in Turkey. The response increases over time. In other countries, there is a significant impact on exchange rate volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines patterns of voter defection from Turkey's incumbent AKP amid major economic and democratic decline. As in other electoral autocracies, defectors constitute a small but politically significant group in Turkey, where the opposition's ability to secure a transition from authoritarianism depends on reducing the incumbent's vote share. Based on survey data gathered in November 2021 and February 2022, we find that while the high level of partizanship among AKP voters hinders defection, persistent economic and democratic decline still reduces incumbent support. We also found that defections are higher outside of the lowest income group. Our findings have important implications for opposition strategies in electoral autocracies. Directing public debate away from identity issues to economic and democratic problems increases the likelihood of defection. In addition, offering voters clear superior alternatives decreases the cost of uncertainty that comes with change and increases the likelihood of defection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We use forecast errors made by the Federal Reserve while preparing open market operations to identify a liquidity effect at a daily frequency in the federal funds market. We find a liquidity effect on most days of the reserve maintenance period in addition to settlement day. The effect is nonlinear; large changes in supply more consistently have a measurable effect than do small changes. In addition, a higher aggregate level of reserve balances in the banking system is associated with a smaller liquidity effect during the maintenance period but a larger liquidity effect on the last days of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 4, 1994 the Federal Reserve began the practice of announcing changes in the targeted level for the federal funds rate immediately after such decisions were made. This paper investigates to what extent the policy of "the announcement" affected a key ingredient in the monetary transmission mechanism: the term structure of nominally risk-free, Treasury securities. We find that term rates react much more in unison during announcement days than at any other time. Moreover, the practice of circumscribing almost all changes in the federal funds rate target to Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting dates regiments the formation of market expectations in the overnight rate and the price discovery process of term rates, thus facilitating the Fed's goal of controlling long-term rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides empirical analysis to show increasing pressures over the Central Bank of Turkey (CBT) throughout the past decade where the CBT gives into such pressures, despite the Central Bank Law, which ensures tool independence. The study suggests that the relations between the government and the CBT reflect recent political changes where the government increased its control over state institutions, following rising costs of losing office. However, this trend not only has economic costs such as a restricted capacity to achieve price stability and sustainable growth but it also limits horizontal accountability of state institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although reserve requirements (RR) have been used in emerging markets to smooth credit cycles, the transmission mechanism remains blurry. Using bank-level data, we unveil the interaction of RR with bank lending. We identify a new channel that works through a decline in banks' liquid assets and loan supply due to an increase in RR. "Quantitative tightening" through RR raises the short-term funding needs of the banking system, which is met by collateralized central bank lending, thus depleting banks' unencumbered liquid assets. Our results suggest that such a shift in bank liquidity is associated with a significant change in lending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate economic and political developments in Turkey’s construction sector over the last decade and consider their implications. We find that during the first term of the government of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), thanks to administrative and economic incentives, both private and public construction rose considerably. Despite the construction sector’s contribution to growth, there is also evidence of a transfer from the industrial sector toward the construction sector, which led to significant decline in the trend growth of the industrial sector in the era prior to 2006. Such evidence disappears in the post-crisis period, when the growth of private construction slows. However, overcentralization, clientelism, an absence of transparency, and limitations on citizen participation in urban planning remain as problems that need to be addressed through urban reform. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Islamic banks create an interest in their own right as a rising branch in financial intermediation, particularly in the post-crisis era. In addition, they also deserve the attention of students of Islamism due to their possible connection with Islamic movements. Through a comparison of Islamic and conventional banking, we analyze the motivations and behavior of Islamic economic actors who determine the cash flow to Islamic banks. Our findings suggest that, in contrast to popular views that portray these actors as ideologues or financiers of radical Islam, they have pragmatic motivations and may adapt to liberal systems in order to seize economic incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The price puzzle, an increase in the price level associated with a contractionary monetary shock, is investigated in a rich, 12-variable SVAR in which various factors that have been mooted as solutions are considered jointly. SVARs for the pre-1980 and post-1990 periods are identified empirically using a graph-theoretic causal search algorithm combined with formal tests of the implied overidentifying restrictions. In this SVAR, the pre-1980 price puzzle depends on the characterization of monetary policy, and the post-1990 price puzzle is statistically insignificant. Commonly suggested theoretical resolutions to the price puzzle are shown to have causal implications inconsistent with the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the potential of financial market changes to represent a fundamental shift in the way the Federal Reserve offered liquidity through the primary credit facility in the U.S. It notes the capability of the facility to yield credit to financially sound banks at a rate 100 basis points above the target federal funds rate of the Federal Open Market Committee. It depicts the effectiveness of the implicit costs of borrowing in the stabilization of the money market.

Graph-theoretic methods of causal search based on the ideas of Pearl (2000), Spirtes et al. (2000), and others have been applied by a number of researchers to economic data, particularly by Swanson and Granger (1997) to the problem of finding a data-based contemporaneous causal order for the structural vector autoregression, rather than, as is typically done, assuming a weakly justified Choleski order. Demiralp and Hoover (2003) provided Monte Carlo evidence that such methods were effective, provided that signal strengths were sufficiently high. Unfortunately, in applications to actual data, such Monte Carlo simulations are of limited value, as the causal structure of the true data-generating process is necessarily unknown. In this paper, we present a bootstrap procedure that can be applied to actual data (i.e. without knowledge of the true causal structure). We show with an applied example and a simulation study that the procedure is an effective tool for assessing our confidence in causal orders identified by graph-theoretic search algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that much of the research into the link between money and interest rates suffers from misspecification. The measure of money and the measure of interest rates are not always well matched. In examining the transmission of monetary policy, we show that using an appropriate measure of money, Federal Reserve balances, and the appropriate interest rate, the federal funds rate, a clear liquidity effect exists. Furthermore, we explain how a lack of a clear institutional understanding may have contributed to the finding of a “liquidity puzzle” in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide an accessible introduction to graph-theoretic methods for causal analysis. Building on the work of Swanson and Granger (Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 92, pp. 357-367, 1997), and generalizing to a larger class of models, we show how to apply graph-theoretic methods to selecting the causal order for a structural vector autoregression (SVAR). We evaluate the PC (causal search) algorithm in a Monte Carlo study. The PC algorithm uses tests of conditional independence to select among the possible causal orders -- or at least to reduce the admissible causal orders to a narrow equivalence class. Our findings suggest that graph-theoretic methods may prove to be a useful tool in the analysis of SVARs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talks about the impact of the U.S. Federal Reserve's 1994 policy change, by which it announced the target level for the federal funds rate, on the liquidity effect and the manner in which the central bank uses open market operations to control the federal funds market as of May 2002. Model of the reserves market; Deviations of the federal funds rate from the target; Investigation of the manner in which the Trading Desk juggles different types of open market operations.