An efficient housing finance system has significant importance both in meeting the housing needs of individuals and in reinforcing the development of the construction, finance and other related sectors of an economy. Today, developed countries have advanced housing finance systems in which funds flow from savers to home-buyers by the mortgage markets. On the other hand, despite its recognized economic and social importance, housing finance often remains under-developed in developing countries mainly due to the lack of macroeconomic stability. Turkey, being a developing country, has made an important step towards the development of a mortgage system with the passage of the new Mortgage Law by the Parliament. Accordingly, the purpose of this thesis is to examine the applicability of mortgage system in Turkey. For this purpose, housing finance systems of some developed and developing countries are reviewed, and the housing finance system in Turkey is explained. Further, causality between the total amount of housing loans issued, inflation and nominal interest rates in Turkey is analyzed with the Toda-Yamamoto VAR approach. VAR analysis shows the negative impact of nominal interest rates on the total amount of housing loans issued in Turkey. To sum up, considering its economic and social environment, Turkey has adapted best international experiences, and it is possible for a mortgage system to develop in the country by the new mortgage legislation combined with the lower interest rates as inflation declines.

Researchers tend to disagree on the direction of the relation among R&D and economic growth, suggesting that if economic performance determines R&D investments countries might overinvest in their R&D expenditure. The purpose of this thesis is therefore to shed new light to this question by first establishing a relation among the variables and thereafter investigate the Granger causality between them. This paper is based on a panel study consisting of 60 countries, with various levels of income during the period 1996-2015. Using a fixed effects model, we can establish a positive relation between growth in R&D expenditure and GDP growth and using Granger causality tests and the Toda-Yamamoto augmented Granger causality tests, we can conclude that the growth of R&D expenditure determines economic performance in the short-run for countries in all income levels, however no conclusions can be made regarding the direction of Granger causality in the long-run. Hence, our results show that R&D investments stimulate economic growth and should, to some extent, be favoured by policy regardless of a nation's level of development.

The indebtedness of Swedish households has more than doubled in the last ten decades despite the implementation of a mortgage ceiling and stricter amortization requirements. This study takes form to investigate how it is possible that debt related to housing is rising while new regulations against it has been set and how housing prices continues to increase when lending is supposed to be harder.This analysis estimates whether there are indications of an existing price bubble in the housing market of Stockholm. It is done by testing fundamental economic factors to the price index of housing in Stockholm, to see if they support the price development. If the analysis shows that housing prices cannot be predicted by the fundamental economic factors, it is possible that the price is a self-running series1 which could be an indicator of a price bubble. If fundamental factors that are being used as control variables seem to follow the same trend as the price development of the housing market, the speculation of price bubble will be rejected.

This thesis employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model (ARDL), Toda-Yamamoto causality analysis, and ordinary least square (OLS for robust estimation) techniques to empirically investigate the impact of economic growth and energy consumption on the environment in Nigeria from 1980 to 2020. The results of cointegration demonstrate a long-term link between the model's input variables. The outcome of the first objective of the study shows that trade and economic development in Nigeria worsen the state of the environment. Environmental quality is accelerated by financial development; nevertheless, FDI is proven to be insignificant in predicting environmental quality. The result demonstrates that FDI and energy use both have the potential to significantly speed up the rate of environmental degradation. Nevertheless, trade has a negligible impact on the environment in the country, and financial development slows down environmental deterioration. The study also finds that the combination between energy and economic development improves Nigeria's environmental quality. The outcome of the fourth objective shows that economic expansion and energy consumption have a favorable impact on the environment. Additionally, environmental degradation, energy use, and economic growth are all causally related. Moreover, the outcome of the robust estimation reveals a positive and significant relationship between economic growth and energy consumption in the environment. Therefore, the study suggests economic policies with environmental control measures. This could be through an emphasis on the use of other alternatives of low-emission energy, that will mitigate the level of C02 and enhance energy utilization for a better environment in the nation.