Did events during the First World War reflect in the foreign exchange rates? A new EHES working paper by Avni Önder Hanedar, Hatice Gaye Gencer, Sercan Demiralay, and İsmail Altay from different universities in Turkey provide evidence on the foreign exchange trading at the Istanbul bourse of the Ottoman Empire to shed light on this question.
They examine the influence of political risks on the foreign exchange rates at the Istanbul bourse during the First World War. Their empirical methodology is identifying the abrupt changes in the value of Lira against the currencies of the neutral countries at the Istanbul bourse, i.e., the Dutch Guilder, the Swedish Krona and the Swiss Franc. They exploit unique data on daily foreign exchange rates announced at the Istanbul bourse from May 1918 to June 1919. The data are manually collected from the Ottoman Empire’s official newspaper, i.e., Takvim-i Vekayi.
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A column of Takvim-i Vekayi showing the value of Turkish Lira against several foreign currencies on 27 August 1918 (Takvim-i Vekayi. (28 August 1918). Kambiyo: 6. |
The working paper can be downloaded here: https://www.ehes.org/EHES_108.pdf
References
Hall, G. J. (2004). Exchange rates and casualties during the First World War. Journal of Monetary Economics, 51(8): 1711–1742.
Hanedar, A. Ö., Hanedar, E. Y., and Torun, E. (2016). The end of the Ottoman Empire as reflected in the İstanbul bourse. Historical Methods, 49(3):145–156.
Hanedar, A. Ö., Hanedar, E. Y., Torun, E., and Ertuğrul, M. (2017). Perceptions on the Dissolution of an Empire: Insight from the İstanbul Bourse and the Ottoman War Bond. Defence and Peace Economics, (Forthcoming).
Kanago, B. and McCormick, K. (2013). The Dollar-Pound exchange rate during the first nine months of World War II. Atl. Econ Journal, 41(4): 385–404.
Takvim-i Vekayi. 30 May 1918–11 June 1919.