Parliamentary Election Cycles and the Turkish Banking Sector

Abstract

This paper analyzes the effects of parliamentary election cycles on the Turkish banking system. Using annual bank-level data representing all banks in Turkey during 1963-2007, we find that there are meaningful differences in the structure of assets, liabilities and financial performance across different stages of the parliamentary election cycle. However, we find that government-owned banks operate similarly to both domestic and foreign-owned private sector banks before, during and after elections. Our estimates also show that government-owned banks underperform their domestic and foreign-owned private sector counterparts.