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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.

Despite the mounting costs of the pandemic at the global scale, the country-specific costs were rather heterogenous. National performances varied depending on the restrictive measures adopted, institutional strength, as well as adherence to stringency measures. We illustrate that obedience and rule of law strengthen the performance of the containment measures.

COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating effect on both lives and livelihoods in 2020. The arrival of effective vaccines can be a major game changer. However, vaccines are in short supply as of early 2021 and most of them are reserved for the advanced economies. We show that the global GDP loss of not inoculating all the countries, relative to a counterfactual of global vaccinations, can be higher than the cost of manufacturing and distributing vaccines globally. We use an economic-epidemiological framework that combines a SIR model with international production and trade networks. Based on this framework, we estimate the costs for 65 countries and 35 sectors. Our estimates suggest that up to 49 percent of the global economic costs of the pandemic in 2021 are borne by the advanced economies even if they achieve universal vaccination in their own countries.

The COVID-19 crisis can turn into the biggest emerging market (EM) crisis ever. EMs observed the financial shock first, with the tightening global financial conditions. They will soon experience the full wrath of the perfect storm with possibly much larger spill-back effects for the global economy. This paper focuses on a large representative EM, Turkey, with low foreign currency reserves, high foreign currency debt and a questionable record on policy credibility. The pandemic has already led to a substantial decline in economic activity and Turkey's policy options are more limited given its low fiscal space and its reliance on capital flows. We estimate the costs and benefits of a full lockdown and offer policy recommendations that will help to avoid an economic meltdown. In order to prevent a 2001 style crisis, the best option is to consider an immediate lockdown and subsidize the economy. The external funding that is necessary for the economic relief package should be secured through international financial institutions rather than imposing capital controls. Domestic funding should be provided with a well targeted and transparent asset purchase program by the central bank.

Central bank credibility is critical for the effectiveness of monetary policy. The measures of credibility that are based on the changes in actual inflation rate do not perform very well in environments of chronic inflation. We design an alternative measure that allows us to track the evolution of credibility in an inflationary environment. Credibility is defined as the central bank's ability to lower inflation expectations towards its inflation target via current interest rate decisions. We adopt a Bayesian set up to exploit this definition and document how credibility changes over time. Our measure differs from the existing measures that are based on the deviation of inflation expectations from the inflation target. We show that the latter tests may be too blunt in the EM context and either overlook marginal improvements in credibility or incorrectly attribute the temporary reductions in the inflation rate to improvements in credibility. Utilizing a time varying parameters modeling structure, we show that the credibility of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey (CBRT) has declined significantly over time. Potential reasons for this deterioration could be the CBRT's disappointing performance in hitting the inflation target and its exposure to political pressures. We apply our methodology to Brazil as well to highlight its advantages and draw a comparison to the existing literature.

This study examines the effects of price adjustments in the tobacco sector on inflation in Turkey. The findings show that the taxes on tobacco products increase inflation in the short-term. However, the effect is rather limited, a 16 basis points increase in inflation if the current 65.25% Special Consumption Tax (SCT) increases by 25 basis points. Factors that cause inflation in the long-run are cost and demand. The cost-driven impact of tobacco prices on inflation is rather limited due to the low weight of this product in the consumption basket. Nevertheless, the structure of the tax multiplier used in tobacco taxation increases cigarette prices in a non-linear fashion and, therefore, has the potential to disrupt inflationary expectations.

In June 2014 the ECB became the first major central bank to lower one of its key policy rates to negative territory. The theoretical and empirical literature is silent on whether banks' reaction would be different when the policy rate is lowered to negative levels compared to a standard reaction to a rate cut. In this paper we examine this question empirically by using individual bank data for the euro area to identify possible adjustments by banks triggered by the introduction of negative interest rates through three channels: government bond holdings, bank lending, and wholesale funding. We find evidence of a significant adjustment of banks' balance sheets during the negative interest rate period. Banks tend to extend more loans, hold more non-domestic government bonds and rely less on wholesale funding. The nature and scope of the adjustment depends on banks' business models.

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.

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.

Many central banks in emerging economies have used reserve requirements (RR) to alleviate the trade-off between financial stability and price stability in recent years. Notwithstanding their widespread use, transmission channels of RR have remained largely as a black-box. In this paper, we use bank-level data to explore the interaction between RR and bank lending behavior. Our empirical findings suggest that short-term borrowing from the central bank is not a close substitute for deposits for banks. Bank lending behavior responds significantly to reserve requirements and liquidity positions. Our analysis allows us to identify a new channel that we name as the "liquidity channel". The channel works through a decline in bank liquidity and loan supply due to an increase in reserve requirements.

We explore the effect of volatility in the federal funds market on the expectations hypothesis in money markets. We find that lower volatility in the bank funding markets market, all else equal, leads to a lower term premium and thus longer-term rates for a given setting of the overnight rate. The results appear to hold for the US as well as the Euro Area and the UK. The results have implications for the design of operational frameworks for the implementation of monetary policy and for the interpretation of the changes in the Libor-OIS spread during the financial crisis.

This paper assesses the effectiveness of monetary policy communication of the Central Bank of Turkey (CBT) by quantifying the information content of the 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 CBT's words match its deeds, i.e., whether communication improves predictability using the Autoregressive Conditional Hazard model. Our findings suggest that the role of statements in predicting the next policy move have strengthened following the adoption of 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 have become highly significant for the unanticipated changes in the monetary policy communication and the relative importance of communication in driving market yields has increased through time.