The discount rate illusion http://t.co/la12AmLqSc
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Category Archive: Uncategorized
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Mayday on May Day in Turkey (and the U.S.)
As an avid fan of Beşiktaş sports club, I am used to regularly getting teargassed by the police. Therefore, I did not make a big deal of it when my friend told me he and his wife had been introduced to pepper spray on May Day. After all, as our interior minister noted some time [...]
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Private Equity and the Turkish Zuckerberg
You don’t need to be an economist to know that Turkey is small and medium enterprise (SME) country; spending a weekend in the country would be more than enough. Unfortunately, only 20 percent of these companies last more than a decade, according to Kamil Yılmaz of Koç University. In his welcome speech to the conference [...]
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Actual evidence on the Turkish disease:)
Being a columnist is tough. You write a column that you are really proud of. Then, you find out that you messed up!:( I actually wouldn’t say I messed up my latest Hurriyet Daily News column, which I posted here as well. But thanks to a reader, I realized I did not actually show evidence [...]
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The Turkish Disease
The Economist coined the term “Dutch Disease” in 1977 to describe the decline of the manufacturing sector in Holland after the discovery of large North Sea natural gas deposits in 1959. Here is the opening sentence of my latest Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) column, where I introduce the Turkish Disease, which is a variant of [...]
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The expansionary fiscal contraction that worked
Despite the International Monetary Fund/World Bank Spring Meetings, as well as a G20 get-together, the biggest economic news of the past two weeks was the mistake in an influential economic study. Here is the intro. to my latest Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) column. The study is of course the Reinhart/Rogoff (R^2) paper. I am sure [...]
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Istanbul as International Financial Center
It is no secret that the Turkish government wants to make a financial center out of Istanbul. They unveiled this “grand project” back in 2009, and then held a series of public and private meetings with stakeholders and experts afterwards,, which led me to update my original column in 2011. They have also been partnering [...]
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The economic consequences of the peace (for Turkey)
John Maynard Keynes wrote “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” one year after the Great War ended. Misconceptions on the economic consequences of Turkey’s peace with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) led me to act now. This is is the intro. to one of my recent Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) columns. I am sure that [...]
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Of Muslim terrorists and terrorist Muslims
The Boston manhunt came to an end when the police arrested the second Boston Marathon bomber late Friday night. It is likely to be an isolated incident. Here’s the intro. to my latest Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) column, where I calculate the probability of being a terrorist given one is a Muslim. Nothing fancy, I [...]
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Open Letter to Ilham Aliyev
For a change, I am not writing about Turkey. I have an open letter to Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan: “Your Excellency; I visited Azerbaijan for the first time last week to participate in a conference. The presentations were great, and I learned a lot about the Azeri economy. But I was most impressed that [...]
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A Public Apology
A reader was not “happy” that I used the word “heathen” for Jews and Christians in my latest Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) column, which was also posted here. Here’s his/her email to the newspaper editor, with me conveniently in the cc: How could you seriously let Emre Deliveli’s article “Seder’s Four Passover questions” go to [...]
