I collect and harmonize income surveys, new tax data, national accounts, and wealth rankings to correct survey-based inequality estimates that understate top incomes; estimate wealth distributions in the absence of direct data; and distribute non-fiscal components of national income across income groups to make distribution figures consistent with macroeconomic aggregates in Turkey. The study’s main methodological contribution lies in leveraging and validating top taxpayer lists where detailed tax tabulations are unavailable. Under conservative assumptions, the national income share of the top 10 percent increased from 42.1% [39.8%, 53%] to 50.5% [42.2%, 59.7%] between 2005 and 2022. Wealth inequality was more pronounced, with the top 10% holding 75.6% [70.6%, 83.1%] of gross wealth in 2022. The most cautious lower-bound estimates, accounting for the uncertainty arising from multiple limitations, imply a significant upward revision of official inequality statistics.

To identify which households gain or lose in relative terms during inflation, we examine Turkey’s recent inflationary shock, triggered by a policy experiment that kept domestic interest rates low despite rising global rates. Using individual-level panel data, we classify households into social classes based on income sources, decompose income changes into intensive and extensive margins, and model relative income mobility. We find pronounced downward mobility among pension- and transfer-dependent households. Overall, households relying on pensions, wages, or transfers lost ground relative to those earning primarily business income. Among labor-dependent households, job-to-job transitions play a central role in preserving or improving rank, particularly for poorer households. By contrast, informal employment is consistently associated with downward mobility, and new minimum-wage jobs provide no significant protection against relative decline.

Pharmaceutical firms are highly profitable due to high markups enabled by high drug prices. This is justified by the argument that high profits provide incentives for innovation and help fund high research and development (R&D) costs. We investigate the link between past profitability and drug discovery for large publicly-listed pharmaceutical firms between 1980 and 2018. Our sample includes 118 firms with 2534 firm-year observations and in terms of sales corresponds to 55% of the global spending on drugs. By merging three data sets on firm financials, new patent applications, and new drug approvals, we show that pharmaceutical firms’ markups and profitability are consistently higher than average nonfinancial firm profitability, with secularly increasing trends since 1980. Whereas R&D spending has also increased, the number of new drug approvals has not increased at the same pace and the productivity of R&D spending has been declining. In statistical analysis, we fail to identify any strong positive relationship between profitability and new drug discovery. Results are broadly in line with the earlier findings of research on the pharmaceutical industry and provide a contribution to the discussion on the link between profitability and innovation as well as on formulating policies for increasing drug innovation and ensuring the provision of essential drugs while keeping their costs low.

We assess the effects of a sharp minimum wage increase on wages, informality, and employment in Turkey, a large developing economy with one of the highest minimum wage-to-average wage ratios among OECD countries and widespread discrepancies between labor market outcomes of women and of men. We look at the quasi-experimental 2016 minimum wage increase and pay attention to identifying information coming from demographic groups. We find that the increase in the minimum wage had an economically substantial and statistically significant positive impact on wages. Despite the positive wage effects of the increase, we find no negative employment effects. However, we show that the minimum wage increase may have caused an increase in the share of informal employment among workers with less than tertiary education, especially for such workers working for small firms.