Economic Consequences of Daylight-Saving Time: Evidence from Turkey

For last years, it has been hot issue that transition to daylight saving time has some important consequences related to the electricity consumption, human health, performance, behavior and well-being of individuals. Since the cabinet decision in 2016, Turkey has been implementing the summertime throughout the whole year in order to save energy. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to analyze the effects of this change on economic growth and labor productivity by employing quarterly data for the time period 2006:Q1 and 2018:Q1 for Turkey and Threshold AR model in order to incorporate the nonlinear behavior in considered time series. The results show significant effect of this policy change as well as nonlinear behavior in the time series due to continuous fluctuations in the data throughout time which can be classified into at least two regimes as recession and expansion. As a conclusion, the countries should evaluate the effects of daylight saving time (DST) on different indicators before any change in the implementation