Paper

European Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Sciences ISSN 1450-2275 Issue 23 (2010) © EuroJournals, Inc. 2010 http://www.eurojournals.com

Factors Affecting Credit Card Uses: Evidence from Turkey Using Tobit Model

Halil Tunalı Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics, stanbul University, Beyazıt, stanbul, Turkey E-mail: htunali@istanbul.edu.tr , gmhtunali@gmail.com Tel: +530 592 95 68; Fax: +212 668 91 50 Ferda Yerdelen Tatoğlu Department of Econometrics, Faculty of Economics, stanbul University, Beyazıt, stanbul, Turkey E-mail: yerdelen@istanbul.edu.tr Tel: +212 4400000 – 11652; Fax: +212 668 91 50 Abstract Credit cards, also called plastic money, have increasingly become an indispensable element for both consumers and sellers in last 20 years. Their usage has gone up dramatically all over the world and was not limited only to middle and upper income consumers. Credit cards issuers, especially banks, have entered into fierce competition with each others to be powerful in the credit card market that is rapidly improving. Selling more credit cards necessitates knowing strictly the main factors affecting credit card uses. In this paper we examine the factors affecting credit card uses of households in Turkey. For this purpose, 1300 surveys are conducted in the city of stanbul that can be accepted as a small sample of Turkey and questions are directed to household heads. The data obtained from the survey are analyzed with Tobit model to determine factors affecting credit card uses. The results show that credit card uses of households in Turkey are affected by social and personal as well as by economic factors. Our contribution is that we also use some independent variables not used until now in any other work and measure their effects on credit card uses. Keywords: Credit cards, survey data, households, Tobit model, Turkey.

1. Introduction

Credit cards, also called plastic money, increasingly replace money and become one of the indispensable...