Impact of Terrorism on Financial Markets: The Case of Turkey

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of terrorism on the Turkish financial market using daily data from Jan 4, 1988 to May 24, 2016. In order to measure the impacts of terrorist attacks in Turkey we test for causality from terrorism index to returns and volatilities of 3 aggregate and 16 sector level stock indices using a recently developed nonparametric causality-in-test test of Balcilar et al. (2016). The results obtained indicate that there is no causality from terrorist activities to stock market returns (1st moment). However, we find significant causality at various quantiles from terrorist activates to volatility (2nd moment) of tourism, food and basic materials sectors.