Fatih Karanfil

Estimating country-specific environmental Kuznets curves from panel data: a Bayesian shrinkage approach

Designing an efficient global climate policy turns out to be a difficult yet crucial task since there are noteworthy cross-country differences in energy and carbon intensities. In this article, the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis is tested for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and as a modelling technique, the iterative Bayesian shrinkage procedure is employed to handle the cross-country differences. The results suggest that first the EKC hypothesis is rejected for 47 out of the 51 countries considered when the heterogeneity in countries’ energy efficiencies and cross-country differences in the CO2 emissions trajectories are accounted for; second, a classification of the results with respect to the development levels of the countries concerned reveals that the emergence of an overall inverted U-shaped curve is due to the fact that in high-income countries increase in gross domestic product (GDP) decreases emissions, while in low-income countries emissions and GDP are positively correlated.

Formation and deformation of the environmental Kuznets curve for CO2 emissions

Following Roberts and Grimes (1997), we study the temporal instability of the environmental Kuznets curve for a panel of 51 countries over the period 1970-2008. Our results show that: (1) an inverted U-shape curve appears in the early 1980s; (2) the environmental efficiency increases over time as the coefficient of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per unit of primary energy consumption decreases; (3) there is a rising trend of the turning point income that goes from 10,000 USD in the early 1980s to almost 20,000 USD in 2008.

Environmental regulation in the presence of unrecorded economy

Both theoretical and empirical studies which do not take into account the existence of unrecorded economy may not provide a complete insight on the effects of fiscal and environmental enforcement policies in developing countries, where unrecorded economic activities have an important weight. This study attempts to fill that void. Two different cases are considered: first, firms’ production and emissions are audited with different exogenous probabilities; second, a unique probability-to-audit function is determined to audit both emission and production levels of firms, whether in recorded or unrecorded economy. The paper determines the conditions under which environmental regulations may increase the size of unrecorded economy.

The impact of device in social networking: an explorative study with Turkish social network site users on the nature of interactions through personal computers and smartphones*

The purpose of this study is to explore the nature of interactions that develops around social networks through two major device categories: PC and smartphones. This study specifically aims to focus on the reasons for the preference of PC and smartphones distinctively and tries to reveal the significant patterns of usage for social networking through both platforms. This quantitative research employs a survey conducted with a sample of 203 Turkish people who are using PCs and smartphones for accessing social networking sites regularly.