An Analysis of Financial Conditions for Turkey: Evidences from Factor and VAR models

WOS: 000425085400006This paper aims to calculate alternative financial conditions indexes (FCIs) and evaluate the forecasting performance of them for Turkey covering the period 1992:1 and 2015:12. For this purpose, first financial conditions indexes are constructed based on four methodologies: Reduced form demand functions, VAR generalized impulse-response functions, dynamic factor model and factor-augmented VAR models (FAVARs). In the second part of the study the performance of the alternative FCIs are assessed in terms their in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting ability to industrial production gap. The results suggest that the FCI obtained from the homoscedastic FAVAR model provides the best out-of-sample forecasts, hence it is suggested as a leading indicator of economic activity