Journal of Economic Research and Policies
Year:2014 | Volume:22 | Issue:71|Papers Count:9

Housing sector has been witnessing some periods of boom and stagflation and huge increase of prices during recent decades. The periodical volatilities in this sector have led to some structural and sometimes sociological problems, so the analysis of market volatilities always has been in the attention point of policy makers. In this article using equilibrium equation and simulation technique, we are going to investigate the effects of speculation on the housing market volatilities, in Iran during a 17-year period from 1991 to 2008. Using genetic algorithms method and matlab software, the model has been estimated and simulated. The outcomes indicate that speculation’s motivation has been resulted from price expectations and analysis of price trends by investors in past periods which create a form of speculation demand on market. The demand for speculation has a significant effect on the creation of fluctuation in the housing market and causes some periods of booms and recession in this market. Also, by investigation the price elasticity of supply it can be concluded that the speeding up the rate of production and strengthen the supply side can be key factor in controlling volatilities of the market to meet demand of speculation.

Since the Ethical Banking has great importance and have been propagated in recent years, defining a model to rank indexes in these kinds of banks is necessary. The main goal of this paper is to rank basic indexes of the Ethical Banking and another purpose is to analyze different viewpoints of state and private banks’ managers in Iran. So a questionnaire with 30 questions filled out by bank’s managers. Then analysis of variance method has been used to evaluate significance of differences between means. Results show that respecting employees and shareholders and customers and observing ethical behavior are the most important indexes. Also results show that there is no difference between the viewpoints of state and private managers in ranking the indexes.

Exchange market pressure is an important subject which could be applied in different areas. For example it could be used in investigating and analyzing monetary policy. In this paper along with presenting exchange pressure index, we review how monetary authorities of Iran reflected against to EMP during the first quarter of 1368 to fourth quarter of 1391. In order to explain the theory, the Girton and Rober monetary model and in order to estimate the model, Structural Vector Auto Regressive approach (SVAR) have been used. The results indicate that traditional theory of EMP is also applied to Iran. This means that the implementation of monetary expansion policy leads to increasing exchange market pressure. They also show that the effect of variable of money multiplier coefficient on the EMP is positive and the effect of variables of domestic product and the oil price on EMP is negative. The results of decomposition of variance of EMP indicate that in the first period about 95% of changes in this variable are explained by itself. As time passes and during tenth period, the explanatory power of the variable is somewhat reduced so that in the tenth period, about 79% of EMP changes is explained by the variable. Among other variables, the money multiplier coefficient has the most explanatory power which is about 10%. The other variables explanatory powers are as follows: national income 6.7% domestic credit 3.38% and finally oil price 1.61%.

Despite the importance of banks they are extremely vulnerable in times of liquidity shortage, which causes withdrawal of bank and bank bankruptcies, because there are assets with low liquidity and much more debts with high liquidity. The liquidity risk in normal times does not cause a lot of problems for banks and could be solved by financeing through bonds issuance. But during economic crisis special conditions, it creates some problems for banks which called "bank run”. The sudden withdrawal of deposits and sudden drop in banks' credit resources would lead to liquidity shocks and have a negative effect on banking stability soundness and on lending ability of banks. The purpose of this paper is to propose a model that allows policy-makers to consider the probability of bank run. So in order to do this, the panel logit method has been used. The results of the study indicate the importance and effect of the banking soundness and deposit substitute variables such as exchange rate on possibility of sudden withdrawal of deposits.

Different researches have shown that energy intensity changes have inverse relation to energy costs and also technological levels can decrease energy intensity. In the present research, using panel data method we investigate the key factors contribute to energy intensity improvement in all active industries in Tehran stock exchange that provided all the data need for this research during 2006-2011. The results suggest that intensity variance of fixed assets; work labor, capital and raw material and price of these factors have greater importance in comparison to level of these variances in energy intensity improvement in different industries of the country. Based on meaningfulness of variance index of fixed assets ( showing R &D share for decreasing energy intensity index), the results show that the improvement of Research and Development status has decreased the share of energy in manufacturing in different industries. Results also show that relation of energy factor and other factors in many industries is replacement one. Therefore in this industry, increasing price of energy through the changing relative price of factors leads to replacement of other factors to energy and improvement of energy intensity.

In the economic literature, theories of fiscal decentralization have been taken into consideration in order to increase efficiency and productivity of the public sector and regional balance. Establishing provincial revenue – expenditure system and founding administrative and financial institutions in all provinces during the third and fourth development plans some great steps were taken towards fiscal decentralization in Iran. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of fiscal decentralization on economic growth with two index of fiscal decentralization (revenue decentralization and national expenditure decentralization) by using spatial econometric methods. The results show that there is linear positive relation between fiscal decentralization and provincial economic growth. Spatial dependence variable significance reflects the positive effects of economic growth in the region through overflow.

This paper examines elasticity of substitution among electricity, other energy materials and capital in IR. Iran chemical industry, using time series data between (1998-2007). This analysis uses Tran slog production and cost functions due to their economic properties and production inputs are categorized into four categories including capital, labor, electricity and other energy materials. This production function were used to estimate the own, cross price, Morishima and Alen elasticity. The Morishima elasticity for capital-electricity estimated 1.588 and Alen elasticity for capital and other materials estimated 0.698. Cross elasticity between electricity and other materials was equal to (-1.363). So that the results of this paper indicate that capital, electricity and labor substitute each other. But electricity and other energy materials are found to be complements.

Nowadays, the energy intensity from the aspects of sustainable development and also energy security is a strategic indicator for countries. The main objective of this article is the investigation of energy intensity convergence among OPEC countries during 1971-2010. To this end, the pair-wise test of Pesaran (2007) and sigma convergence are used. The results of pair-wise test of Pesaran confirmed divergence of cross-country energy intensity. The necessary condition of pair-wise convergence was accepted with low probability, but, sufficient convergence condition was not met. Dynamics of cross-sectional standard deviation over time also suggests the occurrence of sigma divergence in energy intensity trend among OPEC countries. The results also indicate the divergence of energy intensity in Iran from the average energy intensity of OPEC countries. In conclusion, in the pursuit of international environmental targets and energy productivity policies among OPEC members should be regulated with respect to the non-convergence of energy intensity among them.