Working Papers
Short-Term Community-Wide Effects of School Shootings on Alcohol and Tobacco Consumption (joint with Felix Schafmeister)
School shootings and other tragedies involving gun-violence have become commonplace in the United States. While much research has been conducted into the direct effects on affected individuals, less is known about community-level effects. We use data on grocery-store sales at the county-level to test the hypothesis that the exposure to a traumatic event induces short-run changes in purchases of alcohol and tobacco, well-known and highly accessible substances often linked to coping with traumatic events. Leveraging a specification curve design, we find that although some specifications yield statistically significant effects, there is no robust support for the main hypothesis. We close with a discussion of potential explanations and draw some methodological conclusions for future research.
Immigration, Housing Rents and Residential Segregation: Evidence from Syrian Refugees in Turkey (joint with H. Torun, and S. Tumen)
The massive inflow of Syrian refugees is argued to drastically affect various social and economic outcomes in the hosting regions. In this paper, we use micro-level housing rental data to investigate whether the Syrian refugees have affected the market for housing rentals in Turkey. The unexpected arrival of a large number of refugees due to civil conflict in Syria is used to construct a quasi-experimental design. Since the construction of new housing units takes a long time, the refugee flow acts as a positive demand shock to the sector. We find that the refugee inflows have led to an increase in the rents of higher-quality housing units, while there is no statistically significant effect in the rents of lower quality units. This finding supports a residential segregation story, which suggests that the refugee wave has increased the demand for better and safer neighborhoods, especially among natives. We argue that negative attitudes toward refugees - potentially due to refugee-native conflict along several dimensions - might be one explanation that may be generating this result.
Ethnic Discrimination in the Turkish Labor Market: Evidence from Survey and Field Data (joint with S. M. Cilasun)
The labor market consequences of the ethnic conflict between Kurds and Turks in Turkey are not examined in detail mainly due to data restrictions. In this paper, we try to fill this gap in the literature by providing both survey and correspondence audit evidence of ethnic discrimination in the Turkish labor market against Kurdish minority. First, we show from the survey data that Kurds have lower educational attainment, higher unemployment rate, and longer unemployment spells. Then, we conduct a correspondence audit and find that the Kurdish applicants receive fewer callbacks than the Turkish applicants although their resumes are met with a similar interest. When we consider the gender dimension, we see no differential treatment of Kurdish males and Turkish males but for each callback a Kurdish woman receives, Turkish woman receives 2.5 callbacks. Hence, we conclude that differential treatment by ethnicity might be a feature of Turkish labor market, especially for females.
Does Gender Discrimination Contribute to Low Labor Force Participation of Women in Turkey? Evidence from Survey and Field Data (joint with S. M. Cilasun)
Low female labor force participation continues to be an important problem in the Turkish labor market. Labor market participation of women might be worsened by the cultural and traditional factors such as the division of labor at the household or economic factors, such as discrimination against females. In this paper, we try to identify hiring stage differences among men and women via a correspondence audit methodology. In doing so, we produce two new measures of employer response in addition to the standard callback measure used in the literature. We show that employers interact with female and male applications and resumes similarly when evaluating the job applications. However, there is a positive discrimination against female applicants in the Turkish labor market.