Financial dollarization and currency substitution in Turkey

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, İktisat Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2005

Öğrenci: ÖZGE BAŞKURT

Danışman: ERDAL ÖZMEN

Özet:

This study aims to investigate currency substitution and financial dollarization in Turkey. The extend of dollarization in Turkey appears to be very high according to both the conventional currency substitution and the recently developed financial dollarization measures. This has serious policy implications as a source of financial fragility through currency/maturity mismatches and balance sheet effects. The empirical part of this study contained an investigation of the long run relationships between the variables in a system containing currency substitution ratio, expected exchange rate change and rates of return on domestic and foreign currency denominated assets. The results of the Johansen cointegration analysis based on quarterly data for the 1987-2004 period appeared not to be strongly supporting the General Portfolio Balance Model (GPBM). The theoretical part of this study suggests that the GPBM can be reduced to the Sequential Portfolio Balance Model (SPBM) under the uncovered interest parity (UIP) hypothesis. Consequently, the GPBM may be misleading under UIP. The Johansen cointegration results suggested the validity of the UIP for the Turkish data. The estimation of the SPBM suggested that there is a long-run relationship between currency substitution and expected exchange rate change in Turkey. The elasticity of currency substitution appeared to be high but consistent with those estimated for other high inflation developing countries. The results further supported the presence of a ratchet/hysteresis effect proxied by a trend variable. All these results are consistent with the argument that currency substitution and financial dollarization are important especially in high inflation countries.