Market discipline, bank risk, emerging markets, Russian Federation, G20, G21,

Even though the convergence of regional per capita income has been a highly debated issue internationally, empirical evidence regarding Turkey is limited as well as contradictory. This article is an attempt to investigate regional income inequality and the convergence dynamics in Turkey for the time period 1987-2001. First, the Theil coefficient of concentration index is used to analyze the dispersion aspects of the convergence process. The geographically based decomposition of inequality suggests a strong correlation between the share of interregional inequality and spatial clustering. Then, we estimate convergence dynamics employing alternative spatial econometric methods. In addition to the global models, we also estimate local models taking spatial variations into account. Empirical analysis indicates that geographically weighted regression improves model fitting with better explanatory power. There is considerable variation in speed of convergence of provinces, which cannot be captured by the traditional beta convergence analysis.

We present a continuum economy with risk neutral agents having heterogeneous expectations and restricted short sales. A stochastic version of the model is also formulated and the resulting time series behavior of the price and volume series under a specific money supply process derived. The implications of the model are tested in the emerging Turkish stock market where institutional arrangements comply with the restrictions of the model. The results indicate that, as predicted by the model, price levels and trading volume are cointegrated. The error correction models are also estimated and found to be significant in most cases

Summary. -Turkey experienced a massive banking crisis in February 2001, resulting in the loss of more than a thousand managerial jobs and the closure of 21% of all bank branches in the market. In this paper, we study the behavior of the market and the banks in Turkey before the crisis, from 1988 to 2000, which includes the period of full deposit insurance. The empirical results showed that not only depositors but also borrowers reacted negatively to risky banks and punished them even more during the period of generous government guarantee. However, in the same period, banks were found to increase their moral hazard behavior significantly. Although the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank recommend explicit deposit insurance for developing countries, the findings of this paper suggest that deposit insurance may not be an effective policy tool to improve market confidence, and it does not guarantee a stable economic environment even when the market reacts negatively to the moral hazard behavior of banks.

Cataloged from PDF version of article.A genetic algorithm is introduced to search for optimal policies in the presence of\ud knowledge spillovers and local pollution in a dynamic North/South trade game. Noncooperative\ud trade compounds inefficiencies stemming from externalities. Cooperative\ud trade policies are efficient and yet not credible. Short of a joint maximization of the global\ud welfare, transfer of knowledge remains as a viable route to improve world welfare.\ud 0 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved