Journal of Economic Research
Year:2011 | Volume:46 | Issue:96|Papers Count:12

This paper studies the technical efficiency of 12 branches of Saman Bank over the period 1387-88, relating it to the composition of staff by sex, the ratio of fixed assets to total assets, the age of the branches and the geographic ranking in development indicators of the city where the branch is located in. Data Envelopment Analysis is used to determine the efficiency of branches. The average level of technical inefficiency of these branches is found to be 0.7. The results show a positive relationship between the efficiency and the ratio of fixed assets to total assets, but the second variable is found to have decreasing impact as the absolute value of the variable rises. The study also finds a negative relationship between the efficiency and the ratio of male employees and a positive relationship between efficiency and the value of development indicators of the city the branch is located in.

One of the most important dimention of the industrial structure is the concentration. In order to determine concentration in Iranian industries from 2000 to 2005, the 5-firm concentration ratio is used in terms of sale value, production, value added and employment variables. The results indicate high correlation among concentration ratios in terms of sale, employment, value added and production value: the correlation between sale concentration ratio and that of production has been about 0.9983, sale and value added 0.9611, and between production and value added about 0.9617. Concerning the results, and avalilability of the data, application of the value added concentration ratio is preferred. Despite reduction in industrial concentration, the concentration in most of industries in Iran has been high and display monopolistic structure. Although this is the case in terms of value added concentration ratio, using employment CR reflect that most industries are run in a state of competition. In most of the years durig research period, manufacture of tobacco products, recycling, manufacture of coke, refined petroleum products and nuclear fuel, and manufacture of motor vehicles, trailers and semi-trailers have had concentration ratio of over 70 percent. This has been the case while Texciles industry has been less concentrated industry in terms of all four variables (sale, production, employment and value added.(

In this paper modeling and forecasting of revenue of taxes in fifth development plan is investigated based on a special structure of nonlinear neural networks. The time series of taxes which are studied in this research are related to total tax, direct tax, indirect tax, companies’ tax, income tax, wealth tax, and import tax.Based on the correlation dimension estimation technique, the structure of each time series with respect to linearity, nonlinearity and stochastic process are studied. The results indicate that there is chaotic behavior in tax time series generators and declare possibility of applying nonlinear modeling for mid-run forecast.Then, the results of modeling and forecasting of time series of the taxes during 1959- 2009 using a novel multi- input multi- output artificial neural networks are presented. An upper and a lower band of prediction are also derived for each time series of taxes. The results for next 6 years prediction are very good in training stage and it is supposed to have good results in real next 6 years.

In most of the developing countries, particularly in Asian countries, the initial step of electricity industry restructuring has begun by spot market design. In addition, electricity industry, all around the world, is approaching competitive markets. Meanwhile there are many unanswered questions including deregulation mechanism. In this new framework, producers are considered as private companies which are responsible for their decisions.This paper presents a regional model for the deregulated electricity market where producers trade the electricity with distribution utilities based on spot prices. A mathematical programming model is used to calculate an appropriate base for electricity market transactions. The model has been implemented while different power plants produce electricity and demand fluctuates permanently. The model minimizes total variable costs subject to generation and demand constrains. Isfahan electricity market is considered as empirical evidence. To run the model, General Algebraic Modeling System (GAMS) software has been used.

Considering the importance of government fiscal policy (government spending and state tax income) in economy and its effectiveness in well-being of people, this paper examines the effects of fiscal policy on poverty during the period 1386-1363 in Iran. In this paper, considering the fact that poverty changes can be divided to changes in economic growth and changes in income distribution; initially using Auto-Regressive distribution lags (ARDL) model, the effects of fiscal policy on economic growth and income distribution also have been investigated and then by using Vector Auto Regressive model (VAR), mutual influences among the variables of poverty index (sen index), economic growth rate and income inequality index (the ratio of the top ten percent of income to the last ten percent of income) is considered. The results of this study suggest that consumer spending and government’s tax revenues caused worsening of poverty index (poverty increasing in the community) construction spending also caused the government to improve social indicators of poverty) reducing poverty in the community).

In order to investigate effective factors on bread waste and determine effect genial of each factor on probability of being each family in three categories of low-medium, high and extra high bread waste, the order logit model and the 352 families data from Mashad city were taken in use. The samples have been selected using a simple random sampling method. The survey of marginal effect in order logit model showed that distance to backery, walking to backery, not cooling bread after purchasing, carrying bread on hand, number of times of going to backer’s per week, waiting time in backery, low assessment of bread price, per month income of household, average rate of bread consumption, household supervisor education, and education of other family members, decrease the probability of the family falling into the group of low and medium waste, and increase the probability of the family falling into the group of high waste and extra high waste families. Also, cooperation in buying bread, freezing bread, good assessment of bread quality, mother’s education, number of household members, average age of household, being mother housekeeper, and average rate of food consumption increase the probability of the family falling into the group of low and medium waste, and decrease the probability of the family falling into the group of high waste and extra high waste families.

Economic stabilization is one of the main government objectives in the economy. One of the most destructive and devastating factors that could damage financial markets, are price bubble formations. Thus, bubble creation in stock markets can be considered as a result of investor behaviors, because the market prices mainly reflect investor expectations from firm’s future perspectives. The aim of this paper is to study rational bubbles with the consideration of one of the limitations of arbitrage, Noise Trader Risk, by focusing on rational expectations in the Tehran Stock Exchange. To achieve this aim, by using Panel Data and ARDL approaches, from 2000M3 to 2008M10 appropriate models are estimated. Results indicate that during the underlying period, even with dominance of rational arbitrageur; noise traders have a significant impact in the formation of bubbles. The results emphasize the importance of inflation and price-dividend ratio when assessing investment risk.

The risk free rate of return plays a main role in financial economic theory and financial markets. Due to prohibition of interest in Islamic countries there is no specific financial instrument with risk free rate of return as a criterion for measuring the risk free rate of market. We apply the Kalman Filter to estimate this variable for financial markets in Iran. The technique is based on a state space representation derived from capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and one of the Random Walk or Autoregressive models. The parameters of the model are estimated by maximum likelihood. We generally found that the AR (1) is an optimum model for Rf, and the mean, variance, and final state of the estimated variable are 0.0397, 0.0005, and 0.036 respectively.

Microfinance, banking to the poor, is a recent global phenomenon introduced as a way for combating the poverty in the 1970’s. Before that the poor were not allowed access to credit and loans due to the widespread belief that the poor could not repay loans. But microfinance movement with financial innovations reduced the costs and risks of lending to poor households, and presented as tool for reducing poverty. Today various countries use microfinance, also in Iran there are microfinance institutions.This research tries to survey the impact of microfinance on household income and consumption. So that the household under cover of employment fund of KOMITE-EMDAD in Tehran province has chosen. In this study, ordinary least square method has selected to evaluate the effects of some variables like microfinance and household characteristics on household income and consumption.The empirical results indicate that the income of households that used the credit of this fund has increased.

The challenge of "Keynes vs. Classics" has been considered by economists and historians of economic thought. The centre of this challenge is: whether Keynes has really presented a new theory. In fact, the historical question is: whether the Keynesian Revolution has occurred? If we accept the Scientific Revolution concept as transforming a new paradigm in economic explanations and predictions, then, we can argue that there are three main differences between Keynes and the Classics. These differences, considered as the elements of Keynesian Revolution, are philosophic-epistemic, methodological and theoretical differences. The revolution, in terms of the nature of economics is considered to be a philosophic-epistemic difference. According to this aspect, Keynes transformed the nature of economics, as considered by classical economists. From the viewpoint of methodological difference, Keynes has used the equilibrium method for economic analysis. Furthermore, the most important theoretical elements are found in many categories such as investment, saving, interest rate, policymaking, rigidity of prices and wages, non-clearing of markets and uncertainty. The final conclusion is that the Keynesian Revolution has occurred in all these aspects.