A New Method to Measure Economic and Financial Uncertainty in Turkey

Abstract

This paper aims to measure the level of economic and financial uncertainty in Turkey. More specifically, it constructs a search-based ‘Turkish Economic and Financial Uncertainty Index’ (TEFUI) and employs the real-time monthly Google Trends data to cover the period from January 2004 to December 2018. The paper considers more than four hundred potential words to construct the TEFUI to generate the baseline TEFUI. The findings from both the correlation analysis and the Impulse-Response shocks of the Vector Autoregression models indicate that the TEFUI is significantly related to various indicators of the domestic economy and global uncertainty indices.

Keywords: economic uncertainty, financial uncertainty, consumer sentiment, consumer confidence, stock market volatility, emerging markets

JEL Classification: E32, D81, D12, C32