sinem ayhan

Turkish labor market has experienced low employment performance over the last two decades, which has become more striking after the crisis in 2001. Despite the rapid recovery in output growth, unemployment could not record such an improvement and has remained around 10 % since then. This fact has introduced a new phenomenon to Turkey called “jobless growth”. As a solution to the bottlenecks in the labor market, the concept of “flexibility” has been more frequently pronounced by policy makers and academicians at both national and international level. In the light of flexibility-based arguments, this book takes an impulse from the basic assertion of the neoclassical theory that it is the labor market rigidities that are mainly responsible for high unemployment/low employment performance. The aim of the book is to analyze labor market flexibility with a particular focus on the Turkish context. The analysis should help shed some light on understanding the concept of jobless growth, and ...

Policy makers frequently voice concerns that carbon pricing could impair economic development in the short-run, especially in low-income countries such as Uganda. We estimate a quadratic almost ideal demand system (QUAIDS) for energy and food items to assess how consumers’ welfare, energy and food demand, as well as nutritional intake, can be expected to react to a carbon price of US$40/ton. The results suggest overall progressive welfare effects in the range of 0.1 – 4.9% across the population. We further observe declines in the demand for electricity, kerosene and transport in the range of 4 – 20%, with concomitant shifts within food consumption baskets, due to complementarities with cooking fuels, and income effects. Heterogeneous demand responses across expenditure terciles and rural-urban areas reveal significant disparities in food and calorie consumption as well as protein and micronutrient intake due to carbon pricing. The bottom third of households exhibit nutritional declines of up to 16%, while middle-class urban households witness increases by around 9%. Complementary social protection policies in conjunction with carbon pricing could ease potentially adverse effects on economic development outcomes in Uganda.

This paper examines the role of non-wage cost rigidities in slowing down employment creation by assessing the effect of a policy aimed at fostering employment for women and young men introduced in Turkey in 2008. Exploiting a difference-in-difference-in differences strategy, I assess the employment effect of the reduction in the employer contribution share of the social security premiums. The results, net of the recent crisis effect, suggest a positive effect of the reduction in non-wage costs on employment creation for the targeted group (women) shortly after the announcement of the policy. JEL Classification C31; J08; J21; J32

This paper analyzes the labor supply response of married women as a result of their husbands’ job losses (‘added worker effect’). The study uses panel data from Turkey to test the presence of an added worker effect during the global economic crisis of 2008. Identification is achieved by an instrumental variable approach. In particular, an exogenous variation in the output of male-dominated sectors induced by the crisis is used as an instrument for the husbands’ unemployment. Results show that the probability of a woman participating in the labor force increases by 15–28% in response to her husband’s unemployment. However, the effect is not contemporaneous; rather, it appears with a lag of one quarter and only operates for two quarters. The effect is mainly driven by financially-constrained (less-educated and young) couples, which suggests the prevalence of an income effect in spousal labor supply decisions.

This paper estimates the labor supply response of married women to their husbands' job losses (Added Worker Effect) in Turkey exploiting the exogenous variation in the output of male-dominated sectors hard-hit by the crisis for identification. Findings based on Instrumental Variable approach suggest that the AWE explains up to 64% of the observed increase in female labor force participation observed in Turkey.

This paper examines the role of non-wage cost rigidities in slowing down employment creation by assessing the effect of a policy aimed at fostering employment for women and young men introduced in Turkey in 2008.  Exploiting a difference-in-difference-in differences strategy, I assess the employment effect of the reduction in the employer contribution share of the social security premiums. The results, net of the recent crisis effect, suggest a positive effect of the reduction in non-wage costs on employment creation for the targeted group (women) shortly after the announcement of the policy.