IRANIAN JOURNAL OF INSURANCE RESEARCH (SANAAT-E-BIMEH)
Year:2013 | Volume:28 | Issue:3 (111)|Papers Count:8

The insurance company in focus intends to raise financial credit and offer enhanced services to the insured and the public. By and large, the need to meet financial obligations arising from claims requires determination of the optimum claims reserve deposited with banks. Therefore, this paper tries to determine the optimum portfolio of risky and risk free assets during 1996-2011, in an Insurance Company. In order to determine the optimum portfolio of the Insurance Company, we use Harry Markowitz Model, also known as Mean-Variance model. Our results indicate that the optimum portfolio includes a mixture of risk-free and risky assets in the proportion of 61 and 39 percent, respectively.

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between life and Non-life insurance development and economic growth in Iran using the ARDL bounds testing approach. Data used cover the period between 1979-2009. The results confirm existence of a cointegrated relationship between variables. The results also suggest that life insurance has no impact on the economic growth neither in the short-run nor in the long-run. But, non-life insurance effects significantly on the economic growth in the short and long-run. Also, there exists a one-way causality from non-life insurance development to the economic growth, economic growth is not the Granger Cause of life and non-life insurance development.

E-commerce is a new information system (IS) which uses mobile devices via wireless to perform a transaction between a merchant service provider for exchange of products or services. A great deal of research has been carried out on technological aspects of mobile commerce but limited research has been conducted on the mobile commerce strategies and their applications. In this paper, we study the use of mobile commerce in the insurance industry in Iran from the perspective of IT professionals and support staffs.Based on our results we found that the mobile commerce technology is indeed suitable for insurance industry. Among the three main tasks in insurance, the technology of mobile commerce has a great applicability in services after contracts registration followed by new contracts registration and information provision, financial services and tax services.

Nowadays Life insurance is a common contract and apart from the security it provides for people, has great investment potentials for the economics. There are two approaches for shariah correction and understanding the legal stance of the life insurance contracts. One is the determination basis of contracts and having a legal place in the jurisprudential contracts and the other is the non-determination basis of contracts and the evaluations using general reasoning. Based on non-determination point of view, when life insurance as an independent contract is compared in general and free from conflicts, we may consider it permissible. To achieve this aim, we should solve problems like ambiguity (Gharar), dependence (Taligh) and usury (Riba) in life insurance and if it is free of conflicts then we may consider it permissible.

This paper is a comparison of the performance between insurance companies' portfolios and other miscellaneous companies listed at Tehran Stock Exchange. The portfolio valuation model we use is based on William Sharpe's CAPM model. It is assumed that a statistical and significant difference exists between insurance companies' investment performance and other Tehran Stock Exchange listed companies.Our data includes four insurance companies for the period between 2002-2009. We examined one sample t-test in SPSS for this purpose and the results uphold our assumptions. Thus, we propose that insurance companies improve their performance by increasing return and reducing risks.

The low annual rainfall and lack of underground waters in Sistan Province has made agricultural activities completely dependent on Hirmand River. Hirmand River flow has fluctuations in such a way that in the past people in the area have always suffered from continuous droughts and flooding. The introduction of water supply insurance and the analysis of different patterns of water flow is one method of reducing the fluctuations in Sistanian farmers' gross incomes. This is the aim of this paper and we use a combination of modeling and simulation techniques. First, we stochastically simulate monthly flow variation data of Hirmand river from 1957 to 2009 by Copula methods. Then, the relationship between the available water and the gross incomes of farmers were estimated by programming, econometrics, and simulation techniques. Finally, the effects of different patterns of river flow insurance on the reduction of the gross income risks of farmers were analyzed. Our results showed that using different patterns of river flow insurance can be an effective method of modeling fluctuations in farmers' gross incomes.

The main aim of this paper is to investigate the theoretical and empirical relationship between social security and economic growth in Iran. On theoretical basis, there are many channels for this relationship. Our empirical study in this paper uses Iranian data for 1973-2008 and shows that real social security costs and GDP are cointegrated. Also, using a VAR approach, we showed that the growth rate of social security costs explains a notable percentage of changes in GDP growth.

In recent years, the share of finance based sectors of Tehran Province in the Iranian economy, especially in the insurance industry, has been significant. Considering that Tehran Province has the highest penetration ratio and share of the total insurance premium (2.73% and 48.1% respectively). In this paper, an input-output model is used for determining the importance of insurance industry in Tehran Province. For this purpose, first, we use an input-output table of Tehran Province for the year 2006. In estimating this table, we used an extended AFLQij method. Then, the importance of financial sectors in Tehran Province is measured based on the backward and forward linkages according to the Chenery-Watanabe-Rasmussen and Eigen vector methods.The results showed that the insurance industry is of high importance in Tehran Province. In 2006, the share of final demand of the insurance industry output was 49.7% which is by far lower than national average and implies high intermediate viability in the province's economy. Also the service nature of the insurance industry is recognized as contributing to production rather than consumption.