Wage Curve Evidence From Turkey’s 2007-2009 Income and Living Conditions Survey

The aim of this paper is to investigate the labour market conditions of Turkey via disaggregated wage curves following the argument that group specific regional unemployment rates might better describe wage curves than aggregate ones. Using 2007-2009 panel survey of Income and Living Conditions, I found that there is weak evidence in favour of the existence of a wage curve for Turkey. Different categories of unemployment rate give different results on the unemployment elasticity of pay. For male workers, wage curve relationship seems to exist only when male unemployment rates are used and for female workers, there is no evidence in favor of a wage curve. When the data are split into two age groups, and age specific unemployment rates are used, there appears a wage curve for women of age twenty-five to sixty-four and a positive unemployment elasticity of pay for the women of age fifteen to twenty-four. These results might be explained by Ilkkaracan and Selim (2003)’s argument focusing on the labour force participation dynamics of women in Turkey.