We analyze the influence of technological progress on pharmaceuticals on rising health expenditures using US State level panel data. Improvements in medical technology are believed to be partly responsible for rapidly rising health expenditures. Even if the technological progress in medicine...

There has been an explosion of innovation backed by venture capital since late 1970’s. Nonetheless, a great deal of innovation still occurs within large companies. In this paper, I investigate the factors that determine when innovation is performed by venture-backed firms and when by large...

Recent empirical research has demonstrated that countries with higher levels of religiosity are characterized by greater income inequality. We argue that this is due to the lower level of government services demanded in more religious countries. Religion requires that individuals make financial...

Studies in family economics and anthropology suggest that grandmothers are a highly valuable source of childcare assistance. As such, availability of grandmothers affects the cost of having children, and hence fertility decisions of young parents. In this paper, we develop a simple model to...

The Southeast European (SEE) countries have strong roots in social and historical terms. Their experience of the last couple of decades indicates, however, that SEE is in continual change and transformation: They want to attain more open societies, functioning markets and well-knit international...

Using different credit measures, this study identifies the credit booms in Turkey that have occurred after December 2002, and examines their determinants. We find that the primary factors that have a strong correlation with the probability of a credit boom are the changes in the slope of the...

This paper investigates the evolution of systemic risk in the Turkish banking sector over the past two decades using comovement of banks’ stock returns as a systemic risk indicator. In addition, we explore possible determinants of systemic risk, the knowledge of which can be a useful input...