THE JOURNAL OF PLANNING AND BUDGETING
Year:2018 | Volume:23 | Issue:1|Papers Count:6

The presence of asymmetric information is an important source of efficiency loss for insurance companies and could reduce profitability. In this paper, we test the conditional independence of coverage choice and risk, where “ conditional” means conditional on all variables observed by the insurer. We use two parametric methods: a pair of probits and a bivariate probit model. The data includes all third-party and hull policies as well as claims data for private automobiles during 2013-2016. The data are derived from the administrative database of a small insurance company in Iran. Once we control for individuals’ risk aversion by limiting our test to subsamples of individuals who only bought minimum third-party insurance, we find evidence for the presence of asymmetric information. Based on our results, those who bought hull and third party insurance have higher risk of accident in comparison to those who only bought third party insurance. The existing premiums does not fully compensate for this extra risk.

The question of whether parents have preferences over their children’ s sexes has long been of interest to economists and demographers. In this study, we first investigate the presence of these preferences among Iranian parents. Then, having established its existence, we next turn to characterize the quality of sex preference. There are two widely used methods for addressing this issue in the literature. The first is to estimate a Logit model which relates the probability of the birth of a new child to the sexes of its elder siblings. The second is to estimate a proportional hazard model that links the time interval before each birth to the sexes of preceding children. This study makes use of both methods. The results confirm the existence of sex preferences in Iran. Iranian parents are shown to favor a rather balanced mix of boys and girls, though boys seem to be slightly preferred over girls.

The public budget is an official manuscript forecasting the economy for a short period (one year), and its proper execution can be viewed as an index of economic success for the government. The governments are generally unable to execute the balanced budget and in order to finance current and infrastructure expenditure, they will face budget deficit. The purpose of this research is to explore the determinants of budget deficit during the five economic plans (1989-2015). Accordingly, using JohansenJuselius Co-integration and ARDL approach, the effects of tax incomes, oil incomes, government expenditure, the rate of economic growth and the rate of inflation on the budget deficit are estimated. The results show that the budget deficit has a significant and negative relationship with tax incomes, oil incomes and economic growth rate; whereas it has a significant and positive relationship with government expenditures and the inflation rate. Moreover, oil revenues have the largest impact on the public budget deficit, while the economic growth rate has the least impact.

Nowadays, economic growth is one of the most prominent objectives of most economic policies, but an objective which usually results in environmental degradation. Economic growth and development require the use of energy as one of the most important inputs of production, and inaccessibility of affordable and reliable energy sources has frequently led to economic and social retrogression in many parts of the world. The main objective of this paper is to measure energy-environmental efficiency for Iran and oil-rich countries using the Data Envelopment Analysis method with undesirable outputs and to investigate factors affecting it using the panel Tobit regression method. The results show that Iran’ s average energy-environmental efficiency under constant and variable returns to scale are 50 and 54 percent, respectively. This means that it has the lowest energy-environmental efficiency compared to other studied countries. Also, there is a significant and negative relationship between the use of fossil fuels and population with energy-environmental efficiency, whereas there is a significant and positive relationship between the extent of trade openness and energy-environmental efficiency. Accordingly, this study proposes some executive strategy and recommendations for increasing energy-environmental efficiency.

“ Financial system” enforces long and stable restrictions through assigning numerical limitations on the fundamental indices of budget. After such restrictions are formed, the determined quantities are not changeable during the relevant time period and such determined quantities would be the guideline for the execution of financial policies. By being dependent on oil revenues in an unbalanced manner, Iran’ s public finance has evolved in a way that it has made the country’ s economy dependent in nature. The government’ s budget has provided grounds for growth in prices and inflation through its dependence on oil revenues which is the main source of finance for public expenditures. On the other hand, with an increase in imports resulted from improvements in the oil sector and in order to neutralize the inflationary pressures and financing the Rial revenues of government’ s budget, the country’ s dependence on foreign sources has been intensified. In this study, by analyzing the resources and public consumption of the budget and the international transition, it has been suggested that in order to overcome the main structural problem of the budget (i. e. dependence on oil), three steps must be taken. First, transferring the minimum amount of resources coming from oil export to the government’ s budget. Second, reforming the tax revenue system by expanding tax bases and eliminating exemptions. Third, increasing the productivity of current expenditures by establishing performance-based budgeting, executing it within a mid-term framework of governmental expenditures and transferring the capital asset projects and executing them within a public-private participation system.

The main challenge of developing countries is to achieve growth and development. The extant economic growth literature illustrates that the quality of institutions and social infrastructure are important factors that influence the economic growth and development. Accordingly, many analysts believe that regarding such institutional factors, the rule of law is one of the most prominent aspects necessary for a system to achieve investment and economic growth. This study aims to investigate the impact of institutional variables on economic growth in developed and developing countries for the period 1995-2015. To this end, Panel Smooth Transition Regression (PSTR) model has been used. The estimation results of model reject the linearity hypothesis, and estimate a model with two regimes that proposes a threshold at institutional quality indicators of 0. 1627 and 0. 625 for the countries under study. It is demonstrated that the factor of rule of law has a positive impact on economic growth; however, this impact is higher in the second regime. The results also show that in both regimes, the variables of institutional quality indices, economic freedom, human capital and other control variables have a positive effect on economic growth. Moreover, the intensity of the variables influencing the changes in both groups intensifies when institutional quality improves.