RESUME
PERSONAL
INFO
I grew up in Adana, a south coast city in Turkey on the Mediterranean. Following my mathematics and science studies in Düziçi Anatolia Teacher Training High School, I was accepted to the Department of Political Science at Istanbul Bilgi University in the fall of 2001 with university full scholarship. I then joined the Economics program at Bilgi University as a second major. I successfully completed my coursework and was awarded Bachelor degree with first class honors.
After completing my undergraduate studies, I went to Department of Economics at Nevada University in the U.S. where I received my MA degree in Economics.
Currently, I am a lecturer at California State University, Research Assistant at Pomona College and received Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. I recently submitted my Ph.D. thesis on “Consequences of Protracted Domestic Conflict on Investment of Public and Private Agents; Macroeconometric Investment Model and Political Economy of the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey.” My primary research fields are the political economy, development economics, the economics of conflict and terrorism.
The current agenda of my research focuses on examining the impact of protracted terrorism in investment decisions of public and private agents. Private investment incentives account for a fast-growing share of public expenditures in many developing countries, making them an ever more important component of fiscal policy discussions. It is considered one of the policy instrument to reduce grievances of disadvantaged groups/minorities who live under harsh conditions due to regional economic disparities. Whether this policy affect severity of conflict is an empirical question which I intend to study in details. In the course of my research, I have applied newer econometric methods to address the empirical challenges of studying the effects of protracted conflict on investment, namely dynamic panel data estimation. These methods have broad applications beyond topics in development economics and conflict studies.
I enjoy hiking, playing soccer, travelling, cooking and reading in my spare time...