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 Contamination Policy (with Banu Demir & Swati Dhingra) 

• 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)