A. Talha Yalta

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at TOBB University of Economics and Technology

In recent years, financial inclusion has taken center stage in policy discussions regarding achieving higher growth rates and reducing poverty levels. The existing literature analyzing the relationship between financial inclusion and GDP growth mostly assumes a one-way relation from financial inclusion to GDP, often ignoring potential reverse causa...

p style="text-align:justify"> Deposit dollarization in Turkey has been on the rise, reaching record levels in 2022. This was caused by the worsening macroeconomic fundamentals along with the transition to the presidential system in 2018 and the associated deviation from the monetary policy stance afterward. The unique case of Turkey presents an exc...

We examine the determinants of military spending of the six countries in the Gulf Region by using a partial adjustment model in a system setting estimated with the three-stage least squares (3SLS) method. Our model takes into consideration the institutional inertia as well as intercountry correlations, both observed and unobserved. In addition to e...

We adopt the maximum entropy bootstrap methodology in a rolling window framework in order to investigate the time varying determinants of the US demand for defense spending. Our results based on annual data between 1967 and 2018 show that the US defense demand is mainly driven by lagged military burden, economic growth, GDP share of non-military go...

We investigate claims of regional bias in the sovereign credit ratings given by the rating agencies Fitch, Moody's and Standard & Poor's by considering a wide range of macroeconomic, financial, institutional, regional and geopolitical indicators for 99 countries categorized into eight regions plus the United States. Empirical results based on seemi...

Oil price hikes can have disruptive effects on the current account balances of oil-importing developing countries, which largely depend on external energy sources for domestic output. Nonetheless, the relation between oil prices and current account has been analyzed only in a limited number of studies for the developing countries. This paper contri...

By undertaking a large scale simulation study, we demonstrate that the maximum entropy bootstrap (meboot) data generation process can provide accurate and narrow parameter confidence intervals in models with combinations of stationary and nonstationary variables, under both low and high degrees of autocorrelation. The relatively small sample sizes...

Much of the existing literature on demand for natural gas assumes constant and single-value elasticities, overlooking the possibility of dynamic responses to the changing conditions. We aim to fill this gap by providing individual time series of short-run elasticity estimates based on maximum entropy resampling in a fixed-width rolling window frame...

We expose the dynamics of road fuel demand by employing maximum entropy resampling based interval estimates in a fixed width rolling window framework. Our approach facilitates using a uniform specification in a sequential procedure while also providing robust and efficient estimates that can evolve over time. Ours is also the first study to develop...

We present a model of household saving toward a mortgage loan under an exogenous down payment requirement and preference for owning over renting. Our model explains a set of empirical observations such as the dual effect in the form of some households, in response to higher down payments, becoming discouraged savers while those who do not abandon p...

Cloud computing is a relatively new technology that facilitates collaborative creation and modification of documents over the internet in real time. Here we provide an introductory assessment of the available statistical functions in three leading cloud spreadsheets namely Google Spreadsheet, Microsoft Excel Web App, and Zoho Sheet. Our results sho...

The increasing popularity and complexity of random number intensive methods such as simulation and bootstrapping in econometrics requires researchers to have a good grasp of random number generation in general, and the specific generators that they employ in particular. Here, we discuss the random number generation options, their specifications, an...

Working Papers are published without a formal refereeing process, with the sole purpose of generating discussion and feedback. Abstract We employ a panel causality approach in order to examine whether financial liberalization affects the magnitude of capital flight, which measures unrecorded accumulation of foreign assets by the private sector. Our...

In conventional causality testing based on asymptotic distribution theory, there is a high risk of wrongly rejecting the true null of no causality especially when the sample size is as small as typically seen in the literature. In this study, we offer a formal diagnosis of the existing contradictory results on the causal relationship between energy...

We employ a maximum entropy bootstrap based framework to analyze the energy consumption and real GDP nexus between 1950 and 2006 in Turkey. Our approach provides more accurate inference in comparison to conventional hypothesis tests based on asymptotic theory. It also avoids preliminary testing and shape-destroying transformations such as differenc...

We survey the literature on the accuracy of econometric software. We also assess the advantages of open source software from the point of view of reliability and discuss its potential in applied economics, which has now become fully dependent on computers. As a case study, we apply various accuracy tests on GNU Regression, Econometrics and Time-ser...

The R statistical environment is rapidly becoming widely popular among economists inside corporations and academia. As a result, we now see a number of recently published books such as Cryer and Chan (2008), Kleiber and Zeileis (2008), and Pfaff (2008) which focus on econometrics using R (see Eddelbuettel 2009a,b, for reviews of the latter two) Vin...

Applied econometrics has become fully dependent on computers and software tools. It is therefore important that the reliability of various programs providing econometric functionality is vetted within the profession. Here, we report on the results of our verifying the accuracy of Gretl (GNU Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library) using th...

We discuss the various sources of error in numerical computations with the use of examples from the literature relevant to time series analysis. We also submit a case where, by manual verification, we were able to discover a plausible forecast to be erroneous due to a number of software flaws in the XLSTAT addin for Microsoft Excel. Furthermore, af...

We provide an assessment of the statistical distributions in Microsoft® Excel versions 97 through 2007 along with two competing spreadsheet programs, namely Gnumeric 1.7.11 and OpenOffice.org Calc 2.3.0. We find that the accuracy of various statistical functions in Excel 2007 range from unacceptably bad to acceptable but significantly inferior in...

The GNU|Linux operating system is rapidly gaining ground as an attractive alternative to the proprietary platforms particularly in academic institutions and government agencies. Here, we supply an assessment of this resource from the perspective of econometricians, discuss its benefits and disadvantages along with a basic overview of some of the po...

The numerical reliability of the GAUSS Mathematical and Statistical System by Aptech Inc. has been the subject of a number of studies which resulted in the iden- tification of various critical accuracy errors for different computational methods. We conducted a comprehensive testing of this widely used package on the estima- tion, statistical distri...

GRETL (GNU Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library) is a reasonably sophisticated, cross platform, and open-source econometrics package. This paper discusses the functionality provided by version 1.6.0 and reports the results of comprehensive testing of the program's numerical precision. We find that, overall, GRETL can be considered at le...

Working Papers are published without a formal refereeing process, with the sole purpose of generating discussion and feedback. Abstract We present a simple, elegant model of household saving toward a mortgage loan under an exogenous down payment requirement and preference for owning over renting. The model delivers a closed form solution that assoc...

Binding liquidity constraints is a commonly cited explanation for the empirical failure of the standard life-cycle permanent income hypothesis. The down payment required for a mortgage loan is a well defined liquidity constraint and an average household faces this limitation at some point in their lifetime. Consequently, we propose an original dyna...