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Article Citation - WoS: 4Citation - Scopus: 4Dissecting Turkish Inflation: Theory, Fact, and Illusion(Springer, 2022) Kantur, Zeynep; Ozcan, GulserimThe policy debate in Turkey over the impact of interest rate on inflation concerns the question of what policymakers should do when faced with volatile and high inflation. Motivated by this discussion, we provide an empirical analysis by connecting the cost channel to the Phillips relation. Our findings prove the existence of the cost channel. However, other determinants of inflation -labor share of income, prices of imported inputs, and consumption goods -dominate the cost channel in Turkey.Article Citation - WoS: 11Citation - Scopus: 13What pandemic inflation tells: Old habits die hard(Elsevier Science Sa, 2021) Kantur, Zeynep; Ozcan, GulserimCOVID-19 has led to changes in individuals' consumption habits, which will cause the calculation of inflation based on the average consumption basket to give distorted information. Using debit and credit card spending data of Turkey, we build CPI weights and compute an alternative pandemic consumption basket price index for Jan 2020-Feb 2021. Our findings show that the pandemic inflation is higher than the official inflation rate during the first lockdown, suggesting a behavioral change in consumption. However, in the reopening period, old habits come back. During the second lockdown, the difference between the pandemic and the official inflation rates is trivial in comparison with the first lockdown. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Article Citation - WoS: 1Citation - Scopus: 1Optimal Robust Monetary and Fiscal Policy Under Uncertainty on the Lower Bound(Elsevier, 2024) Ozcan, Gulserim; Traficante, GuidoThis paper studies robust policy when the policymaker has Knightian uncertainty about the exact position of the effective lower bound (ELB). First, we characterize optimal discretionary policy when a benevolent policymaker controls the nominal interest rate and the level of government spending. Compared to the full information case, an uncertainty -averse policymaker overestimates the level of the ELB, thereby triggering a more aggressive reduction in the nominal interest rate prior to the liquidity trap. Furthermore, the anticipation of a larger increase in public spending improves the trade-off between inflation and the output gap, and dampens the perceived worst -case level of the ELB. As a result, a less conservative fiscal stabilization is desirable to address the uncertainty concerns of the policymaker by partially substituting for the nominal interest rate at the ELB. Moreover, an inflation -conservative policymaker mitigates the impact of uncertainty on equilibrium outcomes even better than a fiscally active policymaker.
