Empirical evidence for gender differences in Turkey

Abstract

Consumer attitude surveys classified as leading economic indicators aim at extracting information from respondents regarding their perceptions of economic outlook. A typical consumer confidence index includes questions designed to measure the changes in the past-current and current-future pairs of economic outlook perceptions of the participants as well as a question that examines the consumer’s view on the current stage of economic activity. These surveys use equal amount of male and female participants. This paper checks the existence of perceptional difference of genders using CNBC-e consumer confidence index for Turkey. First, we calculate monthly consumer confidence indices for men and women for January 2003 – March 2011. Then, employing this data set, we use the recently developed frequency domain analysis of Breitung and Candelon (2006) and wavelet comovement analysis of Rua (2010) to assess whether these indices follow similar patterns before and after the recent global crisis in time and frequency domain. Our results show that women consistently diverge from men and seem to be on the pessimistic side-due probably to lower levels of wealth in terms of expectation formation. Moreover, this difference is increasing when purchasing durable goods is considered.