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 compulsory military service in Turkey. Exploiting this natural experiment, we devise an empirical strategy to estimate the intention-to-treat effect of...

1970s witnessed violent, widespread, and highly-politicized student protests in Turkey. Small protests turned into bloody street clashes, the death toll exceeded 5,000, and a military coup came in - which resulted in mass arrests. Universities were at the center of the conflict and violence. We...

This paper presents new evidence on the causal relationship between fertility and female labor supply. We particularly focus on how informal employment affects post-fertility labor supply behavior of mothers. We employ an instrumental variable strategy based on an unused data source for twin...

Although the season of birth variable is often used as an instrumental variable to estimate the rate of returns to schooling in the labor economics literature, there is an emerging consensus that the season of birth is systematically associated with later outcomes in life such as the educational...

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...

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...

I develop an intra-firm theory of group design and teamwork in the presence of peer effects. The purpose is to understand the interlinkages between intra-firm group formation and the extent of wage dispersion within the firm. Given a set of heterogeneous workers, the manager faces the challenge...

We investigate the impact of a substantial minimum wage increase, which became effective in January 2016, on consumer loans in Turkey. Using bank-level data and designing an original identification strategy, we ask whether the loans provided by banks with a historically high share of low-wage...

We exploit an age-specific minimum wage rule - which sets a lower minimum wage for workers of age 15 than that for workers of age 16 and above in Turkey - and its abolition to estimate the causal effect of a minimum wage increase on youth employment and education. Using a regression...

Employers use various proxies to predict the future labor productivity levels of the job applicants. Success in school, especially in high-level coursework, is among the most widely used proxies to screen the entry-level candidates. We estimate the causal effect of graduating with honors - i.e.,...