The focus of this letter is the upward trend of red meat prices in Turkey that began to surge in 2009. A typical explanation for such price increases would be an inadequate supply of livestock. Yet, although measures were taken to raise the supply of red meat, they were not sufficient to reverse or stop this upward trend in prices. We specifically search for the dynamics behind the price spikes by exploring whether they were driven by speculation. We investigated the presence of rational speculative bubbles in the red meat market in Turkey by employing a recent methodology developed by Phillips et al. (2015). We found evidence for explosive periods and detected
In this study, using the recent recursive unit root tests proposed by Phillips et al. (2015), we identify and date-stamp periods where food and energy prices deviate explosively relative to other prices in the economy and analyse the implications in terms of anchoring inflation expectations. During the period from January 2003 to July 2018, we have detected the existence of such periods for 17 out of 27 EU countries. Identifying these explosive periods is particularly important since evidence reveals that consumers change, i.e., revise their inflation expectations during periods when headline consumer prices deviate explosively from core prices. Furthermore, it is realized that consumers take macroeconomic variables into account as well as past inflation when forming inflation expectations in both normal and explosive periods. On the other hand, there are particular differences among groups of countries while adjusting their inflation expectations during explosive phases. A common feature for all the countries is that during explosive periods, consumers change and update their inflation expectations on the basis of information coming from the interest rate. More specifically, consumers in all the countries perceive a higher current interest rate as an indication of higher future inflation, leading to higher inflation expectations in explosive periods. A particularly important policy implication of these findings is that periods of explosive deviations in headline prices from core prices should be monitored closely while designing policies to anchor inflation expectations.
The question of why some countries suffer from crises, while others escape them, is challenging. Empirical evidence in the literature suggests that countries with stronger financial institutions are more able to withstand crises. This study empirically investigates whether the probability of crisis depends on the political institutional structure. More specifically, we question whether the failure to democratize polity successfully creates an environment for financial institutional weaknesses, which have the potential to lead to banking crises. It is found that the effectiveness of the prudent supervision of the financial sector in lowering the probability of banking crises is more pronounced in more democratized countries and when the political framework is more institutionalized.
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