Browsing by Author "Karahasan, Burhan Can"

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Citation Count: 44
The Economic Costs of Separatist Terrorism in Turkey
(Sage Publications inc, 2017) Bilgel, Firat; Karahasan, Burhan Can
Turkey has been suffering from separatist terrorism and the political conflict it implies since the mid-1980s, both of which are believed to have a negative impact on economic welfare. This article investigates the economic costs of Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) terrorism, particularly in the Eastern and Southeastern provinces of Turkey by invoking the synthetic control method. We create a synthetic control group that mimics the socioeconomic characteristics of the provinces exposed to terrorism before the PKK terrorism emerged in the mid-1980s. We then compare the real gross domestic product (GDP) of the synthetic provinces without terrorism to the actual provinces with terrorism for the period 1975 to 2001. Causal inference is carried out by comparing the real per capita GDP gap between the synthetic and actual provinces against the intensity of PKK terrorist activity. Extended over a period of fourteen years (1988 to 2001), we find that after the emergence of terrorism, the per capita real GDP in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia declined by about 6.6 percent relative to a comparable synthetic Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia without terrorism.
Citation Count: 5
Self-rated health and endogenous selection into primary care
(Pergamon-elsevier Science Ltd, 2018) Bilgel, Firat; Karahasan, Burhan Can
This study assesses the causal effects of primary care utilization on subjective health status in Turkey using individual-level data from the 2012 Health Research Survey. Employing recursive bivariate ordered models that take into account the possibility that selection into healthcare might be correlated with the respondent's self reported health status, we find that selection into primary care is endogenously determined and that the utilization of primary care significantly improves self-rated health after controlling, for sociodemographics, socioeconomic status, health behaviors and risk factors, and access to healthcare. We show that the causal association between healthcare utilization and health status is robust to the use of objective measures of health and specific types of care, suggesting that the use of a single-item question on self-rated health and binary measures of preventive care utilization is valid.
Citation Count: 3
Spatial distribution of healthcare access and utilization: do they affect health outcomes in Turkey?
(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2019) Karahasan, Burhan Can; Bilgel, Firat
This paper examines the link between healthcare access/utilization and health outcomes in Turkey within a spatial framework. Our initial set of findings highlight an overall duality in health indicators which is getting stronger once a spatial dimension is included. Specifically we find wider spatial dichotomy for health outcomes relative to access and utilization measures. Finally once we consider unobserved heterogeneity, spatial spillovers and spatial variability; our results pinpoint a non-robust link between healthcare access/utilization measures and health outcomes which works better among the already developed regions of Turkey. Overall, our combined results indicate an ongoing polarization of health-based human capital development which coincides with local variations of the relationship between healthcare access/utilization and outcomes in Turkey.
Citation Count: 23
Thirty Years of Conflict and Economic Growth in Turkey: A Synthetic Control Approach
(Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2019) Bilgel, Firat; Karahasan, Burhan Can
This study seeks to estimate the causal effects of PKK separatist terrorism on economic development in Turkey using the synthetic control method. By creating a synthetic control group that reproduces the Turkish Gross Domestic Product (GDP) before PKK terrorism emerged in the late 1980s, we compare the GDP of the synthetic Turkey and the actual for the period 1955-2008. Our study finds that the Turkish per capita GDP would have been higher by about $2600 had it not been exposed to terrorism. This translates into an average of 21.4% higher per capita GDP over a period of 21 years.