Based on a law enacted in November 1999, males born on or before December 31st 1972 are given the option to benefit from a paid exemption from the compulsory military service in Turkey. Exploiting this natural experiment, we devise an empirical strategy to estimate the intention-to-treat effect...

Informal jobs offer skill acquisition opportunities that may facilitate a future switch to formal employment for young workers. In this sense, informal training on the job may be a viable alternative to formal schooling in an economy with a large and diverse informal sector. In this paper, I...

Civil war in Syria, which started in March 2011, has led to a massive wave of forced immigration from the Northern Syria to the Southeastern regions of Turkey. This paper exploits this natural experiment to estimate the impact of Syrian refugees on the labor market outcomes of natives in Turkey....

Among better-educated employed men, the fraction of full-time full-year (FTFY) workers is quite high and stable -- around 90 percent -- over time in the U.S. Among those with lower education levels, however, this fraction is much lower and considerably more volatile, moving within the range of...

This paper presents a nonparametric analysis of the impact of the 2008 crisis on earnings distribution in Turkey. Using micro-level data from the Household Labor Force Survey (2004-2011), I show that the crisis has operated most visibly above the upper quartile of the earnings distribution. I...

Observationally equivalent workers are paid higher wages in larger firms. This fact is often named as the "firm-size wage gap" and is regarded as a key empirical puzzle. Using micro-level data from Turkey, we document a new stylized fact: the firm-size wage gap is more pronounced for informal...

Using a national panel of housing units, this paper documents that the rate of nominal rigidity in housing rents is high in Turkey between 2008 and 2011. We find that, on average, 31.5 percent of the rents did not change from year to year in nominal terms. We then ask if the incidence of nominal...

Estimates on the effect of job contact method -- i.e., informal versus formal search -- on wage offers vary considerably across studies, with some of them finding a positive correlation between getting help from informal connections and obtaining high-paying jobs, while others finding a negative...

We investigate whether individuals feel happier when others around them are happier in broadly defined worker groups. This will be a formal test of spillovers in happiness. Answering this question requires a careful handling of the reflection problem, as it may not be possible to separate the...

Individuals tend to self-report higher well-being levels on certain days of the weeks than they do on the remaining days, controlling for observables. Using the 2008 release of the British Household Panel Survey, we test whether this empirical observation suffers from selection bias. In other...