Uygulamalı makroekonomi üzerine makaleler: Yarı deneysel bir yaklaşım

This thesis combines research on three different applied macroeconomic essays. We use the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) approach for the advanced and developing economies groups. We investigate the matching results to estimate the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) and Average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATT) by employing different matching methods of nearest-neighbor, radius, stratification, and kernel matching. Our results are robust and statistically significantly reveal specific policy implications. The first study examines the impact of adopting the Inflation Targeting (IT) policy on internal and external public debt for advanced and developing economies. Our results are robust and significantly reveal that adopting the inflation targeting policy reduces external public debt both for developed and developing economies. Moreover, on average, the adoption of inflation targeting policy leads to a statistically significant reduction of internal public debt for developing economies. In other words, the quasi-experimental analysis implies that if non-inflation targeting countries had adopted the inflation targeting policy, their external debts would have been statistically significantly lower both for advanced and developing economies while their internal debts would have been statistically significantly lower for developing economies. The second study provides a new perspective on the role of corruption in economic growth. It gives quantitative estimates of the effect of corruption on economic growth. Based on our robust and statistically significant results, economic growth and the inflation targeting policy negatively correlate with the low-corrupt countries. Moreover, being a low corrupt country significantly increases economic growth, and being a low corrupt country significantly increases the probability of adopting IT policy in our sample of emerging markets. To put it another way, we show that if high corrupt countries had a low level of corruption, their economic growth and the probability of adopting IT would have been statistically significantly higher. The main idea behind the third paper concerns the organization of oil exporters. Indeed, the revenues from oil exploitation for OPEC+ member countries have improved macroeconomic performance in some member countries. Our robust statistically significant results show that, on average, being an OPEC+ member increases the economic growth for the full sample and the period before 2008. In other words, we document that if non-OPEC+ oil producer countries had been the organization's members, their economic growth would have been statistically significantly higher.