Floating Exchange Rate Regime and Changing Dynamics of the Foreign Exchange Market in Turkey

The aim of this study was to determine the changes caused by the implementations of currency basket peg and floating exchange regime on domestic foreign exchange market dynamics through the estimation of weights for the reserve currencies in the currency basket. Elasticity coefficients of Turkish Lira against seven currencies were estimated for two sampling periods (1995:01-1999:07 and 2002:01-2008:01) using generalized vector autoregression method. The study focuses on Turkish economy. The scope of the study represents a quite new field of investigation which is analyzed only to a limited extent in the literature. The main contribution of the study was that the study extended the empirical model which was taken as a basis in the majority of the studies on currency basket and the analyses which estimated using vector autoregression method whose sampling was limited to Asia countries, using generalized impulse response normalization approach. The findings obtained from the first period support the weights of currencies in announced basket of currencies. It was observed that Pound Sterling had a significant weight in domestic foreign exchange market dynamics in the second period.