Frequency domain analysis of gender differences in Turkey

Consumer attitude surveys classified as leading economic indicators aim at extracting information from respondents regarding their perceptions of economic outlook. One of the well-known of these surveys is the consumer confidence index developed in the 1940s for the USA by Katona and widely spread to the rest of the world since. 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 by using recently developed frequency domain methodology analysis of Breitung and Candelon (2006). First, we calculate monthly consumer confidence indices for men and women for January 2003 – March 2011. Our preliminary results show that women consistently diverge from men and seem to be on the pessimistic side-due probably to lower levels of wealth-whereas this difference is larger after the global economic and financial crisis-due probably to lower levels of purchasing power.