An Empirical Analysis for the Prediction of a Financial Crisis in Turkey through the Use of Forecast Error Measures

In this study, we try to examine whether the forecast errors obtained by the ANN models affect the breakout of financial crises. Additionally, we try to investigate how much the asymmetric information and forecast errors are reflected on the output values. In our study, we used the exchange rate of USD/TRY (USD), the Borsa Istanbul 100 Index (BIST), and gold price (GP) as our output variables of our Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models. We observe that the predicted ANN model has a strong explanation capability for the 2001 and 2008 crises. Our calculations of some symmetry measures such as mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), symmetric mean absolute percentage error (sMAPE), and Shannon entropy (SE), clearly demonstrate the degree of asymmetric information and the deterioration of the financial system prior to, during, and after the financial crisis. We found that the asymmetric information prior to crisis is larger as compared to other periods. This situation can be interpreted as early warning signals before the potential crises. This evidence seems to favor an asymmetric information view of financial crises.