Parliamentary election cycles and the Turkish banking sector

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 present evidence of meaningful differences in the structure of bank assets, liabilities and financial performance across different stages of the parliamentary election cycle. However, we find that government-owned banks' behavior does not meaningfully differ from that of either domestic and foreign-owned private-sector banks before, during or after elections. Our estimates also show that government-owned banks underperform both domestic and foreign-owned private-sector counterparts.