Betam Working Paper Series #006
Credit Crunch or not? Case of Turkey during the Global Economic Crisis
Kerim Gökay, Zümrüt İmamoğlu ve Barış Soybilgen
Abstract
This paper analyzes whether Turkish firms experienced a credit crunch at the outset of the global crisis. Our hypothesis is that if a credit crunch was experienced in Turkey, firms that are more dependent on external finance for investment and working capital must have been affected more severely. Hence, we should observe a higher drop in their stock returns during the crisis. Using firm-level data, we find that returns of firms with high dependence on external finance for working capital and balance sheet problems before the crisis decline more during the crisis. We also run the same regressions for pre-crisis drops in the stock market as a placebo test. We find that stock returns were not affected by dependence on external finance for investment and working capital in the non-crisis period. Our results suggest that Turkish firms might have experienced a credit crunch at the outset of the crisis even though Turkish banking sector was intact. On the other hand, we find no evidence for a demand effect: Being an exporter does not matter for the decrease in stock returns.
pdf. WorkingPaper006