• DOI:10.1017/S0022050718000724
Corpus ID: 159425371

The Wealth Tax of 1942 and the Disappearance of Non-Muslim Enterprises in Turkey

@article{Ar2019TheWT,
  title={The Wealth Tax of 1942 and the Disappearance of Non-Muslim Enterprises in Turkey},
  author={Seven Ağır and Cihan Artunç},
  journal={The Journal of Economic History},
  year={2019},
  volume={79},
  pages={201 - 243}
}

• Seven Ağır, Cihan Artunç
• Published 2019
• Business
• The Journal of Economic History

Turkey imposed a controversial tax on wealth to finance the army in 1942. This tax was arbitrarily assessed and fell disproportionately on non-Muslim minorities. We study the heterogeneous impact of this tax on firms by assembling a new dataset of all enterprises in Istanbul between 1926 and 1950. We find that the tax led to the liquidation of non-Muslim-owned firms, which were older and more productive, reduced the formation of new businesses with non-Muslim owners, and replaced them with… Expand