Investor protection in Turkey: A cluster analysis

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the investor protection in 32 countries with commonly used investor protection proxies and determining the Turkey?s place among these countries by cluster analysis for three different periods. First period reflects the early period which is before the accounting scandals such as Enron, Tyco and WorldCom; the period of 1994- 1998. Second period data consists of during and after these scandals period; the period of 1998- 2004 and the last period presents the current period; the period of 1998- 2009.The analysis of the study consists of two parts. In the first part, the relation between eight investor protection proxies is examined by correlation analysis. Second part of the analysis presents the three clusters dependent on investor protection level of 32 countries for each period which obtained by K-means cluster analysis.The empirical results indicate that Turkey has a low investor protection, high ownership concentration and low stock market development in the 32 countries. Thus, regarding characteristics of Turkey in literature, the results confirm that Turkey is a developing country with French- civil law origin.On the other hand, Turkey improved its investor protection level through the periods, but it is not sufficient as developed countries.