Oktay Özden

About

Economist · Data Scientist · SFC Modeling

Oktay Özden

Oktay Özden, Assistant Professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, Faculty of Business, Department of Economics.

My research focuses on inflation, income and wealth distribution, and stock-flow consistent (SFC) macroeconomic modeling from a post-Keynesian and heterodox perspective. In my PhD thesis, Inequality and Post-COVID Inflation in a Two-Household SFC Model for the UK Economy (Istanbul Kadir Has University, 2025; supervisor Prof. Dr. Erinç Yeldan), I developed a stock-flow consistent model with worker and rentier households to trace how the post-COVID inflation reshaped income and wealth distribution in the UK. The thesis makes the case for incomes policy as the primary anti-inflationary tool, showing through counterfactual simulations that it contains inflation with far smaller distributional costs than orthodox monetary tightening. The thesis was awarded the Third Prize in the Turkish Economic Association's 2025 PhD Dissertation Award.

Current projects include an empirical SFC model of Türkiye (with Prof. Dr. Özgür Orhangazi), a housing-tenure-based extension of the UK-SFC model that distinguishes renter and owner-occupier households, and editing the Turkish translation of Marc Lavoie's Post-Keynesian Economics: New Foundations.

Before joining Bilgi, I was a Research Assistant at Istanbul 29 Mayıs University (2020–2025) and a Data Scientist at Intellity AI Solutions, working on text mining, social media analytics and churn prediction in R.

Interests

theoryInflation theory · Incomes policy · Classical and post-Keynesian political economy
methodStock-flow consistent modeling · Econometrics
topicsIncome and wealth inequality · Endogenous money · Turkish economy · UK economy
toolsR (advanced) · Stata (advanced) · Python · EViews · Shiny

Memberships

Post-Keynesian Economics Society · Association for Heterodox Economics

Projects

Models, web apps & data science

R Shiny · 8-sector SFC model · OBR-anchored forecast · scenario engine

UK Public Debt SFC: Replication App

Companion app to Interest, Distribution and the Sustainability of UK Public Debt in a Two-Household SFC Model. Runs the paper's model and reproduces every table and figure; users can change the size, timing or instrument of consolidation, interest-rate and fiscal-rule scenarios, run sensitivity variants and explorations beyond the paper (QT design, tiered reserves), and download every run as an Excel workbook.

Password available on request by email.

R Shiny · SFC model · counterfactual simulation

UK-SFC Model: Counterfactual Scenarios

What would have happened to inflation and income distribution in the UK in 2022 if incomes policies, or earlier monetary tightening, had been implemented? The app also replicates the findings of our Review of Political Economy article.

Password available on request by email.

R Shiny · large-scale ODE system · parallel & GPU computing

UK-SFC App

Interactive future simulations of the two-household SFC model: incomes policy against inflation and inequality between workers and rentiers in the UK economy.

Model code available on request for referees and SFC researchers.

R Shiny · text mining · wordcloud · bigrams

Topictisat

Weekly Twitter data of 102 economists, classified as heterodox or mainstream, to reveal how the two groups read the economic agenda. Collecting data automatically every Monday since January 2022. Best Presentation, Why R Turkey 2022.

Open the dashboard

R Shiny · Leaflet · live web data

COVID-19 Shiny Dashboard

Global real-time case and death data on a Leaflet world map, with country views and cross-country comparisons.

Source on GitHub

R Shiny · Leaflet · DT · plotly

Bio-Dash

Visualization of GBIF biodiversity datasets of over 20 GB, scaled by country. Built as the technical task in a successful application to Appsilon (Poland).

Open the dashboard

R Shiny · logistic regression · real-time scoring

Spectra AI

Churn analysis for a security company with customers in all 81 provinces of Türkiye. Real-time risk scores for every customer; new customers enter the model automatically. Data is private.

R Shiny · quanteda · igraph · bigrams

Beyaz Masa Text Mining

For Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality: real-time analysis of complaints, suggestions and demands of Istanbul residents at the district level, by groups such as passengers, workers and retirees. Word frequencies, phrases and word networks. Data is private.

Conferences

Presentations & proceedings

2026
Turbulent Arbitrage and the Equalization of Incremental Profit Rates: Evidence from Major Industrial Economies
- 16–17 Apr 20263rd İktisat ve Toplum Kongresi
- 9 Mar 2026Second Spring Meeting of the Turkish Economic Association (SMTEA 2026)
2026
Asymmetric Pass-Through and Profit Inflation in Turkey
- 9 Mar 2026Second Spring Meeting of the Turkish Economic Association (SMTEA 2026)
2025
From Monetary Tightening to Incomes Policy: Lessons from a Counterfactual SFC Analysis of Post-COVID in the UK
- 29–30 Nov 202521st International Conference of the Middle East Economic Association (MEEA), Marmara University, Istanbul
2025
Post-COVID Inflation and Incomes Policy in a Two-Household SFC Model for the UK Economy
- 29–31 May 2025SMTEA 2025, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul
- 23–25 Apr 20256th Nordic Post-Keynesian Conference, Aalborg University, Denmark
2024
Post-COVID Inflation Dynamics and Its Distributional Effects in the UK: A Two-Household SFC Model
- 19–20 Dec 20242nd İktisat ve Toplum Kongresi, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara
- 5–7 Apr 2024Historical Materialism Istanbul 2024, Istanbul Kadir Has University
2022
Understanding the Causality among Monetary Aggregates: Empirical Evidence from Turkey 2008–2020
with Hakkı Kutay Bolkol & Baki Demirel
- 1–4 Sep 20228th ICE-TEA International Conference of Economics, Turkish Economic Association, Cappadocia University, Nevşehir
2022
Revisiting Shaikh's Theory of Inflation: An Empirical Analysis from European Countries
with Hakkı Kutay Bolkol
- 6–8 Jul 202224th Annual Conference of the Association for Heterodox Economics, SOAS, University of London
- 17 Apr 2022Historical Materialism Istanbul 2022, Istanbul Kadir Has University
2022
Topictisat ile İktisatçıların Twitter Verilerinin Analizi: İktisatçılar Ekonomi Gündemini Nasıl Okuyor?
- 2022Why R Turkey 2022, Istanbul · Best Presentation Award
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Canada Securities Transition Office Problem: COVID and Global Capital Flows
- —Extended Problem-Solving Workshop, The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, Canada
2018
Eichner's Megacorps and Oligopoly: Post-Keynesian Analysis of Pricing Patterns for Turkish Industries
- 27 Sep 2018Asos Congress — Social and Humanities Sciences, Yıldız Technical University, Istanbul
2016
Discouraged Workers in the Turkish Labor Market: 1988–2014
- 12 May 2016Congreconomics II, Marmara University, Istanbul · Best Academic Research Award
- 27–29 Apr 201619th International Students' Conference on Economics, Ege University, Izmir