Working Paper

• Trade Liberalization and Quality Upgrading: Third-Country Effects (link) Journal of Development Economics R&R

I study how a trade liberalization between two countries affects firms in a third country. My analysis focuses on a reduction in trade barriers towards a country that has a comparative advantage in low-quality products. Theoretically, I show that this liberalization increases competition for exporters in the third country, specifically for those exporters that produce low-quality products. To escape this competition, mid-productivity firms upgrade the quality of their exports. I empirically test this theoretical finding by analyzing how Turkish firms responded to the elimination of EU quotas on China in 2005. Following this trade liberalization, the unit value of the products exported by mid-productivity Turkish firms increased by 9 percentage points more than that  of the control group. This upward adjustment in the unit value  of their exports was accompanied by a 23 percentage point increase in the average unit value of their imported inputs. 

Work in Progress

• Plastic Turkey: International Leakages of China's Waste Import Ban (with Banu Demir & Swati Dhingra)  (link) 

Trade and environmental policies of large economies can have significant effects on the level and incidence of pollution and economic activity around the world. This paper studies the environmental and economic effects of China’s ban on plastic waste imports. In recent decades, high-income countries have reduced their plastic waste burden by exporting it to lower-income countries, primarily China, often raising concerns over creation of waste havens in parts of the world where environmental regulation is weaker. Following environmental concerns at home, China banned key plastic waste imports in 2017. This paper shows that China’s policy led to a diversion of trade that had repercussions for countries across the world. Turkey emerged as a major importer of plastic waste from high-income countries. We provide direct evidence that importers in Turkey gained economically from better access to plastic waste that could be recycled and re-used as inputs in production. But their gains did not outweigh the losses of domestic firms that generated plastic waste and were displaced by import competition after China’s ban. These domestic waste generators became more likely to mismanage their plastic waste, including through burning or dumping in water bodies. Air pollution increased more in Turkish regions where they were located. We model the channels of waste recycling and virgin resource use in a gravity model of trade and the environment to quantify the global spillovers of environmental externalities and the welfare impacts of China’s unilateral import ban policy. The ban generated aggregate emission savings through trade destruction effects in the world plastic waste market, but the economic and environmental burden was unequally distributed across countries.

• Heterogeneous Costs of Trade Barriers

Teaching

• Graduate International Trade - University of Cambridge (2024)

• Graduate Econometrics - University of Cambridge (2023)

• Microeconomics - University of Cambridge (2021, 2022)

• Macroeconomics I - Bilkent University (2019)

• Mathematics for Economists - Bilkent University (2018)