Iranian Journal of Economic Research
Year:2015 | Volume:20 | Issue:62|Papers Count:8

One of the factors affecting foreign direct investment is the ease of doing business. The world bank's doing business report provides the indices of the ease of doing business. These indices measure the difficulty, costs and time it would take a standardized mid-sized company to start the business, deal with construction permits, register property, get credit, pay taxes, import and export goods, enforce contracts and complete the bankruptcy process. It also measures the level of protection for investors. Inappropriate doing business decrease inflows of FDI because it increases production cost, increases risk of starting a new business, inappropriate size of the company, reduces the interactions between companies and reduces the financial participations. Thus, the aim of this article is to analyze the effects of doing business on foreign direct investment by using Dynamic Panel Data model for 29 countries over the period 2003-2012. The results show that improved political stability, control of corruption, economic globalization, starting a business, protecting minority investors, enforcing contracts, closing a business, paying taxes and gross domestic product increase foreign direct investment flows.

In this paper, we survey some effective factors affecting house prices in the uptown of Tehran city with using Bayesian econometric method. In this method, we use expert ideas as prior information which causes to effective and better estimations. In this paper, we use sell prices of 546 apartments in the uptown of Tehran in 2014, these data are collected from real estates. We assume sale price of house to be dependent on the size of apartment, age of apartment, having pool, sauna and sport salon in the form of dummy variables. Results of this paper reveal that by using informative prior, an increase in the square meter of apartment causes 14 million and 500 thousands tomans increase in the house price. In our sample, an increase in house's age will cause a decline of almost 75 million tomans in the house price. In our sample, an increase in the age of house in the uptown of Tehran decline of almost 350000 tomans in price of one square meter of house. Our estimation results reveal that having pool, sauna and sport salon in the apartment will cause an increase of 420 million tomans in the house price.

Low and stable inflation with sustainable growth is the first objective of any monetary authority. To achieve this prime goal, reliable forecast of macroeconomic variables play an important role. This paper investigates the forecasting performance of BVAR models with different priors for Iranian economy. For this purpose we use BV AR approach with Gibbs sampling for quarterly data of the Iranian economy from 1989:Q1 to 2007:Q4. The main advantage of this paper is using Gibbs Sampling to estimate BVAR models and use of Quasi BVAR models with Normal Wishart and Minnesota priors in order to compare forecast accuracy of the macroeconomic variables. Comparison of the BV AR with Gibbs Sampler and Quasi BV AR models in this experience shows that the value of MSFE in predicting macroeconomic variables for the four ahead period forecasts in BV AR model with Gibbs algorithms is less than Quasi BV AR models. Generally BV AR model with Gibbs sampling algorithms performs better than Quasi BV AR models in forecasting.

In this study, the continuous wavelet transformation approach is employed to test the dynamics of the causality between two principal inflation indices i.e. consumer price index (CPI) and producer price index (PPI) based on monthly data from 1990:5 to 2013: 12 for the Iranian economy. Analyzing the dynamics of causality between these two inflation indices could provide significant policy implications. One of the dominant aspects of this approach compared with the conventional causality tests is that it has a higher ability in analyzing dynamics of causality between time series. The wavelet, as a band pass filter to the time series, is stretched in time by varying its scale, which makes it possible to show the short run and long run causalities between the time series. In this paper, we apply the continuous wavelet transformation to study the inflationary cycles of the Iranian economy. The results confirm both demand-pull and cost-push nature of inflation by indicating bidirectional causality between the CPI and PPI. In fact, the causality directions vary over time depending on different economic conditions.

The main issue of discussion in this paper is to investigate the decision-making for divorce by using the utility theory. This analysis is constructed on the exit-voice theory to explain what factors tend to increase or decrease the occurrence of divorce. This analysis proposes four hypotheses: first, men with higher income have less incentive to divorce. Second, women's income has positive effect on probability of their incentive to divorce. Third, women's employment destabilizes the marriage and fourth, men's incentive to divorce is higher than that for women. To test these hypotheses, samples of married men and women (at least 35 years old) were used. The results suggest that third hypothesis is rejected while other hypotheses have been accepted.

Among the important factors that affect on economic growth such as physical and human capital, openness of economy etc., the role of financial intermediaries on economic growth has been overlooked. This research aims to investigate the role of financial structure and development as the indices of financial system development on economic growth. To this end, the study uses a regression analysis applying FMOLS method for the period of 1989 to 2011 for the selected Islamic countries. The results indicate that variables of financial structure and financial development have significant positive effects on economic growth. According to the findings, financial system based on market approach is more effective concerning the economic growth. Furthermore, the Granger Causality test indicates that there is a one-way causal relation between development of financial system and economic growth in the short run; however, this relationship has a two-way direction in the long run confirming the Patrick's viewpoint of development.