Kadir Has University
Associate Prof. (YÖK) of Finance,
Assistant Prof. of Finance, Dept. of International Trade and Finance
Program Coordinator, Finance and Banking PhD and Masters Programs
Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences
asli.togan@khas.edu.tr
aslitogan@gwu.edu
Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance, Hedge Fund Activism, Institutional Investors, Private Equity, Mergers and Acquisitions, Alternative Investments, Capital Market Development, Labor and Finance
Journal Articles
Risk Perceptions and Financial Decision Making, with Murat Tinic and Talha Cesim Giray (Borsa İstanbul Review, forthcoming)
Reforming External Debt Governance in Turkey to Reach External Debt Sustainability, with Subidey Togan (Journal of Asian Economics, forthcoming)
Private Equity Industry in Africa: Firm Survival and Growth with Lawrence Maishu Ngalim (Journal of African Business, forthcoming, 2025)
Colonialism in Sub-Saharan Africa, Access to Finance and Firm Performance with Lawrence Maishu Ngalim (Emerging Markets Review, Vol 67, 101300, 2025)
Evaluating Model Concordance in a Multi-Model Binary Scoring Framework: Feature-Specific and Sampling-Driven Agreement Analyses Using Kendall’s Tau Rank Correlation for Credit Risk Assessment, with Arif Selçuk Öğrenci, Ayşe Hümeyra Bilge , Chifaa Kardous, Btissam Hajjaoui, Berkay Çiçek, Burak Yüksel, Özden Gebizlioğlu Özvural, Talat Kasımoğlu (Neural Computing and Applications, Forthcoming, 2025)
Managerial Activism with Senay Agca , Journal of Corporate Finance, Vol. 86, pp. 102588 (2024).
Featured in Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog
Nominated for Best Paper Award 2019 FMA Conference
Nominated for George Washington School of Business Best Summer Paper Award
Reforming Public Debt Governance in Turkey To Reach Debt Sustainability with Selcuk Caner and Subidey Togan, Journal of Policy Modeling, Vol. 44, Issue 5, pp. 1057-1076 (2022).
Voluntary Private Pension Funds and Capital Market Development in Turkey with Fatih Kayhan, Asian Academy of Management Journal of Accounting & Finance, Vol. 18, Issue 2, pp. 195-240 (2022).
Shareholder Coordination, Investment Horizon and Hedge Fund Activism Applied Economics, vol. 54 (21), pp. 2390-2415 (2022).
Overlapping Board Connections with Banker Directors and Corporate Loan Terms: Evidence from Syndicated Loans , Global Finance Journal, Vol. 50 (2021).
Art Investment: Hedging or Safe Haven through Financial Crises with Belma Öztürkkal, Journal of Cultural Economics 44, pp. 481–529 (2020).
Featured in EconomistsTalkArt Blog
An Overview of Voluntary Private Pension Funds in Turkey with Fatih Kayhan, Journal of Financial Research and Studies 13(25), 586-607 (2021).
Books and Book Chapters
Supply Chain Disruptions and Firm Financial Decision Making During COVID-19 - A case of Auto Industry with Tuan Do (Current Topics in Finance: Insights on Evolving Markets and Practices , Scala Publishing, Editor, Dr. Aslı Togan-Egrican)
Revenue Forecasting Issues in Developing Countries with Selcuk Caner (2024, Current Issues in Finance, Gazi Kitapevi, Editor, Dr. Seda Erdogan)
Profitability and Liquidity of Turkish Islamic Banks and the Global Financial Crisis with Guleid Ismail (2022, Muhasebe ve Finans Alaninda Guncel Calismalar, Gazi Kitapevi, Editors, Dr. Samet Evci and Dr. İlker Kefe)
Reports
Financial and Economic Effects of Gender Diversity on Boards with Ata Can Bertay
The Introduction of Quota Implementations for Increasing Women on Boards and their Macroeconomic and Social Outcomes
Silos with Christo Pirinsky (Revise Resubmit)
Human capital accumulation requires substantial investment and the ability to sell acquired skills in a market stimulates this investment. Marketability, however, partitions human capital into homogeneous pools of standardized skills (silos), which inevitably reduces the variety of skills available for the production process. Consistent with the idea that silos impede innovation, we find that creation and destruction activities in the economy concentrate within industries with similar skill sets. We also show that recessions force migrations of human capital across less similar industries, allowing for disruptions in one sector of the economy to spur technological innovation in other sectors.
Colonial Pathways, Access to Finance and Firm Performance within CEMAC with Lawrence Maishu Ngalim (Submitted) (appeared in Top Ten SSRN Downloads for Economic Growth and Africa (Development))
Firm growth is considered to be one of the main drivers of economic growth. Whether adequate access to external finance is an important factor for firm growth is still a point of debate in literature. In this paper, we study the relationship between firms’ access to finance and their performance by using colonial railroads’ and ports’ distance to firm locations as an instrument. Focusing on the CEMAC region (Central African Economic and Monetary Community) which is one of the oldest and important groupings within Africa, we observe that access to finance is indeed an important determinant of firm growth.
Crowdfunding, Financial Access, and Entrepreneurship with Lawrence Maishu Ngalim (Revise Resubmit)
In this paper, we ask whether the adoption of recent technological improvements in delivering financial services such as crowdfunding assists the financially excluded to enhance/embark on entrepreneurial ventures. To address this; we build on the premise that ceteris paribus, a borrower’s distrust in traditional financial institutions attributable to ex-ante asymmetric information, partially reflects their state of financial exclusion, which plausibly triggers the search for an alternative financing model such as crowdfunding. Empirical results highlight the marginal benefits of adopting this alternative financing model: all else equal, crowdfunding positively and strongly affects entrepreneurial access to finance. Our findings suggest that in countries with less bank account penetration, entrepreneurs are more likely to rely on crowdfunding financing. These effects remain robust to alternative specifications that capture country-level differences in crowdfunding opportunities. The study has policy implications on private sector development regarding alternative financing channels for entrepreneurs.
Market Transparency and Investor Activism, with Murat Tinic
Investor activism remains one of the important corporate governance mechanisms today. Through activism, investors can seek control by accumulating a number of voting shares or by winning boards seats. However, this is costly. As a result, the activist would need to have an incentive to take on their investment in order to achieve trading profits. Using microstructure trading data from the Securities and Exchange Commission, we first analyze whether trading patters in hidden orders can shed light on the activists' intentions on target firms. The literature also argues that coordination among institutional owners matter for an activist to be successful in their demands. As a result, we next analyze hidden orders to see whether informed institutional investors trade target firm stock when an investor activist arrives. Our findings indicate that there is increased hidden order activity starting two periods before the quarter of activism announcement and that these results significant for targets with more concentrated ownership among blockholders compared to sample of matched firms that did not receive activism. The results provide more insights into the actions of investor activists such as hedge funds as well as their coordination ability with other institutional blockholders within the target firm.
TUBITAK (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) 1001 - Special Call for Sports Research- Development of Tennis in Turkey: Determination of the determinants of elite athlete training with econometric and machine learning models and providing policy recommendations (Coordinator)
TUBITAK - 1001- Role of Risk Factor Knowledge of Individual Investors in Preference of Unregulated Financial Products: Unregulated Financial Product Mapping for Turkey, Evaluation of Effects of Regulation and a Regulation Proposal (Researcher)
TUBITAK - 1005 - Artificial intelligence-based decision support system for dynamic financial scoring and lending in company loan applications (Researcher)
2025
EDUFIN25 Financial education, Why, what works, what doesn’t and for whom Workshop, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy (Presenter, in June)
2024
2nd Conference on Economics and Society, TOBB University, Ankara (December, presented by co-author)
2023
Financial Management Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL (October, presented by co-author)
Financial Management Association European Conference, Aalborg, Denmark (June, Presenter, Discussant)
9th Finance Workshop, Middle East Technical University, Ankara (presented by co-author)
Global Finance Conference, Treviso, Italy (June, presented by co-author)
2nd EBRD and TOBB Workshop on the Status of Women on Boards, Istanbul (January, Presenter)
2022
Global Development Finance Conference (Africa Growth Institue) (November, presented by co-author)
8th Finance Workshop, Ozyegin University, Istanbul (Presenter)
EBRD and TOBB Workshop on the Status of Women on Boards, Ankara (Presenter)
Academy of Finance Conference, Chicago, IL and virtual (Presenter)
2021
World Finance Conference (Presenter, Discussant, Session Chair)
Global Development Finance Conference (Africa Growth Institue) (presented by co-author)
Kadir Has University Economics Departmental Seminar (Presenter)
Kadir Has University Departmental Seminar (Presenter)
2020
World Finance Congress (Presenter, Discussant, Session Chair)
Southern Finance Association Annual Meeting (Presenter, Discussant)
Financial Management Association (Discussant)
Kadir Has University Departmental Seminar (Presenter)
2019
Financial Management Association, New Orleans, USA (presented by co-author)
Kadir Has University Departmental Seminar (Presenter)
2018
Financial Management Association European Conference, Kristiansand, Norway (Presenter)
Virtus Global Center for Corporate Governance Conference , Izmir, Turkey (Presenter)
Kadir Has University Departmental Seminar (Presenter)
Istanbul Finance Congress (presented by co-author)
2017
Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey (Presenter)
Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey (Presenter)
Özyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey (Presenter)
2016
Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey (Presenter)
Ankara University, Faculty of Law, Ankara, Turkey (Presenter)
The World Bank, DECFP, Extended Term Consultant
Cornerstone Research (Manager, started as an Associate))
Bengur Bryan & Co., Inc. (Associate)
The George Washington University, Ph.D. (Finance)
University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business (MBA) (Finance focus)
The Johns Hopkins University (MA) (Applied Economics)
Bilkent University (BA) (Management - Finance focus)
Kadir Has University Technopark Project Evaluation Committee
2025 Global Conference on Technology & AI in Hospitality and Tourism Scientific Evaluation Committee
Etki Girisimciligi Programi Mentor
Arya Women Investment Platform Challenge Club Member
Member of ECGI, AFA, EFA, AEA, FMA
Ad hoc Reviewer (Applied Economics, Review of International Economics, Canadian Journal of Economics, International Journal of Emerging Markets, International Journal of Banking, Accounting and Finance, Turkish Studies, Finans Politik ve Ekonomik Yorumlar Dergisi, İstanbul Business Research, İktisat İşletme ve Finans)
Istanbul Finance Seminar Series Organization Committee (2021-2022 Academic Year)
National Science Foundation Grant Reviewer (2019-2021)
Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) External Grant Reviewer (2019, 2020)
Northern Finance Association 2021 Conference Session Chair (Labor and Finance)