This study examines the labor market effects of the influx of the Syrian refugees in Turkey. Engle-Granger and Johansen co-integration tests, followed by the autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) bounds tests reveal that the Turkish unemployment and Syrian refugee series are co-integrated; pointing out to a long-run relationship. Shortrun and long-run dynamics have been analyzed from the fitted ARDL model and the error-correction parameter is used to examine the speed of convergence. Dynamic OLS (DOLS), fully modified least squares (FM-OLS) and canonical co-integrating regression (CCR) estimations are used to make inferences about the co-integration parameters. Empirical results show that there is a significant and negative relationship between the level of unemployment in Turkey and the number of Syrian refugees in the long-run, indicating that the influx of Syrian refugees has had a reducing effect on unemployment numbers in Turkey. Our results suggest that the Syrian refugees have acted as a complementary labor force to the existing Turkish labor force.

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Many macroeconomic and financial data exhibit large outliers and high volatility so that their returns are usually modeled to follow an infinite-variance stable process. Extreme behaviors in such data tend to exist especially for emerging markets due to frequent existence of high economic turmoil. A relatively new area of research studies that model the financial returns as infinite-variance stable errors exists for emerging markets as well as for industrialized countries. This study aims to briefly introduce the reader the concept of infinite-variance stable distributions, discuss some existing studies on unit root and co-integration tests that assume infinite-variance stable error structure, and then to point out the potential lines of research while showing the significance of this relatively new concept.

Turkish economy has almost experienced a continuous growth process since the first quarter of the year 2002, except for the year 2009 in which the impact of global financial crisis was felt. As a result of this growth period, Turkey has become the 17th largest economy in the world and has set big targets as to join one of the largest 10 economies in the world. In this study, we investigate whether Turkey would be able to meet its 2023 targets or not if the trends and dynamics that have been experienced during the last decade continue. Specifically, we will examine if Turkey's exports will reach 500 billion US dollars, Turkey's GDP will reach 2 trillion US dollars, and Turkey's GDP per capita will reach 25 thousand US dollars. Furthermore, the path that Turkey's macroeconomic indicators should follow in coming years and the different applicable scenarios in order to reach these 2023 economic targets will be studied. The results of this study show that those 2023 targets will not be met. So if Turkey is serious and insistent on these targets, this study may be a warning to policymakers to take the necessary measures when there is still enough time and oppurtunity.