Empirical evidence for gender differences in Turkey

• Author: Celik S., Baydan E.
• Pages: 387-398

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov

Series V: Economic Sciences • Vol. 9 (58) No. 2 - 2016

Empirical evidence for gender differences in Turkey

Sadullah ÇELİK1, Emel BAYDAN2

Abstract: Consumer attitude surveys classified as leading economic indicators aim at

extracting information from respondents regarding their perceptions of economic outlook. A

typical consumer confidence index includes questions designed to measure the changes in

the past-current and current-future pairs of economic outlook perceptions of the participants

as well as a question that examines the consumer’s view on the current stage of economic

activity. These surveys use equal amount of male and female participants. This paper checks

the existence of perceptional difference of genders using CNBC-e consumer confidence index

for Turkey. First, we calculate monthly consumer confidence indices for men and women for

January 2003 – March 2011. Then, employing this data set, we use the recently developed

frequency domain analysis of Breitung and Candelon (2006) and wavelet comovement

analysis of Rua (2010) to assess whether these indices follow similar patterns before and

after the recent global crisis in time and frequency domain. Our results show that women

consistently diverge from men and seem to be on the pessimistic side-due probably to lower

levels of wealth in terms of expectation formation. Moreover, this difference is increasing

when purchasing durable goods is considered.

Key-words: gender difference, consumer confidence, emerging market, wavelet

comovement analysis

1. Introduction and motivation

Consumer manner measurements identified as important economic statistics which

are obtained from participants’ perceptions of economic outlook and give

information on the current and future path of an economy. That kind of statistics is

so important for experts, investors and business and financial press for their

consumption or investment strategies depending. For this reason, we can see

consumer confidence indices (CCI) in many countries to measure and distribute the

latest position of consumer manners. The CCI is developed in the 1940s for the USA

by Katona and then spread to the rest of the world and includes questions based on

measuring the alterations in the past-current and current-future pairs of participants’

perceptions and the consumer’s view on the current stage of economic activity.

1 Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey, e-mail: scelik@marmara.edu.tr

2 M.A. Student, Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey.