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Macroeconomic performance has improved in many countries in the world in the last fifteen years or so. Much of the literature has concentrated on how central bank independence, inflation targeting regimes, and currency :::union:::s have contributed to improving the effectiveness of monetary policy and hence macroeconomic performance. Since the financial system is a key component of the monetary transmission mechanism, we study how a country’s financial development affects monetary policy efficiency in 28 developed and developing countries within 1995-2006. Specifically, our objective is to derive monetary policy efficiency measures (PEMs) - derivative from Krause and Rioja- for 28 Developed and developing countries and analyze the impact that the size and depth of the banking sector and the capital sector have on policy performance. In our empirical analysis we use three financial development measures: private credit, liquid liabilities, and a financial aggregate index that comprises banking and stock market measures. The Results of model estimation with generalized method of moments (GMM) technique, shows that financial development with mentioned indicators has a positive and significant effect on monetary policy efficiency. Also supervision in central bank independency and inflation targeting regimes -as control variables- has positive and significant effect on monetary policy efficiency. This result doesn’t make a difference whether the country is developed or developing and in the both of them more developed financial markets, controlling the central bank independency and applying inflation targeting regimes, significantly help to achieve a more efficient monetary policy.

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The optimal usage of oil as a natural resource is an important problem in exporting countries. These countries always are encountered with uncertainty and volatility of oil prices and its effects on real exchange rate. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship of between oil prices and exchange rate by emphasizing institutional quality in during 1995-2006. The model of this paper is estimated by panel data approach. Findings show that the oil prices have a positive effect on real exchange rate and it reduces international competition power. But institutional quality affects the extent to which the real exchange rates of oil-exporting countries co-move with the oil price. The results show that countries with high institutional quality such as control of corruption and regularity quality have real exchange rates which co-move less with the oil price.

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Monetary shocks are one of the control tools in economic systems. A true perception of these shocks on economic systems can lead us to a suitable policy. In this paper, the impact of monetary shocks on output in Iran has been modeled and investigated using artificial neural networks. We investigated positive and negative shocks separately and confirmed asymmetric effect of these shocks. In addition, nonlinear natures of output changes considering magnitude of shocks were obtained. Results show that optimal condition of monetary shocks to gain maximum output growth can be reached using artificial neural network. In other words, symmetric or asymmetric behavior of monetary shocks depends on economic situation in considered year or period. In addition to, investigation of monetary shocks effect (positive or negative impact) on the production changes, depending on the shock value and this shocks do not have an only particular Effect on production changes. Its can be different.

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The Iranian electricity market is undergoing the first decade of restructuring. Effective competition in wholesale electricity market is a necessary feature of successful electricity industry restructuring. The paper examines the degree of competition in the Iranian electricity market during March to September 2009. The competitive benchmark analysis has been used to simulate producer’s behavior as a price taker firms and compare the competitive market results with actual market outcomes. The competitive benchmark has been calculated through generation costs of producers. Moreover, the possibility of execution market power has been considered by structural index. The finding indicates that the Iranian electricity market has a considerable potential to exercise power market and there were significant departure from competitive behavior during 2009.

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Value Added Tax (VAT) as a method of tax charging with creating a new tax base broad has been interest of many countries. Also Value Added Tax in our country in order to reform the structure of tax and increasing government revenues was approved by the House after a relatively long time and in the second quarter of year 1387 was carried out. Given that this law as an experiment and for five year was carried out study of effects of this tax on macroeconomic variables is of particular importance. In this study has tried to use the analytical relationships Input-Output and production of technical coefficient matrix constant assumption of fixed economic conditions and economic variables and limiting assumptions of this study to the price effects resulting from applying VAT on cost of whole different departments to deal with the country's economy. By using of model price of input - output and applying tax rates issue of Article 12 on exemption for goods and services and ultimately applying export exemption issue of Article 13 on value added tax the price effects of each section of economy is calculated and with and with considering of share of each section from the whole output the price effects is calculated. Results show that implementation of VAT has had very low price effects.

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This study tries to examine the way housing residential investment in Iran's urban area is influenced by the shocks of oil revenues, and for that, time series data spanning the period 1991:1-2007:4 are deployed in a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model including households, firms producing new residential houses, and the production of other economic firms as well as oil sector. The model is based on some simplify assumptions suitable to Iran's economy characteristics as: Iran as a small economy regarding capital flows, Oil Exports and goods imports and no price stickiness in housing sector. Moreover, the allocation of resources in the economy is determined by a central planning. The Model's solution and simulation is processed through using DYNARE as a subset of MATLAB software package. The results showed that the incidence of extreme volatility in the short ‌ behavior of housing residential investment in Iran's urban area, due to shocks of oil revenues, shocks was not Persistent and quickly disappeared. This implies that Iran's economy is suffering from Dutch Disease.

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Life insurance as an investment and assurance tool provides a great source of investment financing in different economies. Despite life insurance development in advanced countries and in many developing economies, it could not get its appropriate share in Iranian family’s basket. This paper investigates factors that affect life insurance demand in Iran. So, random sampling used to get required information in three provinces of Iran (Tehran, East Azerbayjan and Mazandaran). Factors are divided into two main groups: Socioeconomics and psychological. Required data were gathered using questionnaire. Results show that life insurance demand has negative relationship with individual expected health condition, premium, expected inflation, degree of risk aversion and income. Bequest, economic optimism, age, employment of partner and reading has positive relation with life insurance demand. Based on the sample, result show that life insurance demand is not affected by advertisements but is affected by others recommendations.

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The main purpose of this article is to investigate the asymmetric effects of the real exchange rate shocks on the non-oil exports of Iran in the period of 1974-2007. For this purpose, using nonlinear Markov-Switching approach, positive and negative shocks of the real exchange rate have been extracted. Based on the results of the Log Likelihood Function and Akaike Information Criterion, the best Markov- Switching model has been specified as MSIH with three regimes for estimating the exchange rate shocks. After extracting the exchange rate shocks, in the next step, the main model of the research has been estimated by using the Johansen-Juselius and DOLS co-integration approaches. Results show that the impact of some explanatory variables (GDP of home country, GDP of Foreign country, Terms of Trade and Openness) on the non-oil exports of Iran has been positive and statistically significant at 95% level of confidence. However, the impact of both positive and negative shocks on the non-oil exports has been negative. Overall, the main hypothesis of symmetrical impacts of the exchange rate shocks has been rejected.

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Foreign exchange reserves management is a main part of international monetary system that determines the optimum value and optimum exchange composition of foreign reserves. Recently new emerging market countries as well as crude oil exporting economies have accumulated huge stocks of foreign reserves. But the optimality of the composition of these reserves is doubtful. In today’s world economy in which such phenomena as financial crises and variations in the value of main currencies are occurring, the rearrangement in new foreign exchange convergences is probable. So, determining the optimal composition of foreign exchange reserves is one of the most important issues in international and financial economics studies. In this article we used the dynamic optimizing model based on Mean-Variance and Transaction Cost approaches to determine the optimum composition of foreign exchange reserves in selected Middle East crude oil exporting countries during the period 1999-2007. The results show that it is necessary for selected economies to revise their foreign exchange reserves so that to decrease foreign reserves depreciation risk and upgrading their ability to debts repayments.

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The subject of microeconomics is the behavior of firms, individuals and government. According to production theory, rational behavior of the firms, leads to profit maximization. So, one of the most important rational questions in production theory, is the determination of a suitable location of the firm. In the last two decades, several theories have been proposed to analyze the factors affecting the location of economic activities. These theories emphasize on many factors that can be summarized in two categories: factors affecting supply and demand. The aim of this article is to determine and analyze factors affecting the location of electronics industry in Iran. In this regard, 25 factors were identified. Whoever, this number of explanatory variables decreases the number of degree of freedom in a Logit and/or Probit model dramatically. So, the principal component analysis was used to decrease the number of LHS variables. Results show that the industrial development and the creation and maintenance of facilities have important effects on the location of electronics industry in different provinces of Iran. Also due to high proportion of the value to the weight of the final products or the high mobility and tradability of electronics industry products, local and surrounding area‘s income have negative impacts on the industry location.

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The crude oil is both a commodity and a financial asset. As there are many factors affecting the crude oil spot and futures markets, the analysis of the relationship between major factors of these markets is complicated. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the price of crude oil in spot and futures market and identify the effect of the crude oil inventory and the interest-adjusted basis risk on these price changes. The monthly data of WTI spot and futures prices, WTI crude oil inventory and interest-adjusted basis risk are from EIA (Energy Information Administration) database. The data period is from January 1986 to December 2010. Due to the unpredictable volatilities and uncertainties in variables, the GARCH error process models are used. Empirical results show that there is a positive, strong and significant relationship between the spot crude oil price changes and futures prices. Additionally, the basis risk changes can affect the spot and futures crude oil prices up to three lags. Also, crude oil inventory changes have a negative effect on the spot crude oil price changes with one lag.

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One of the important targets of the economic planning is economic growth via enhancement of the labor productivity. In this regard, education expenditures play a crucial role. This study aims at investigating the effect of education expenditures on the level of human capital and economic growth through a computable general equilibrium approach. The data on economic variables and social accounting matrix belongs to the year 2001. Three scenarios on education expenditures are defined and their effect on human capital and economic growth are estimated. The results show that education expenditures have positive effects on economic growth and human capital. A 50% increase in education expenditures in the first period causes 3.81 and 5.8 percent increase in human capital and economic growth respectively. In the second period, the same increase in education expenditures affects human capital and economic growth positively by 5.4 and 7.3 percent respectively. Although separating the economic growth into human and physical factors in the first period shows that there is no relationship between human capital and economic growth, but in second period this separation causes a relationship between the two factors.

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  Data envelopment analysis (DEA) estimates the relative performance of decision making units (DMUs). This paper uses the idea of the Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method and fuzzy set theory to modify the model of DEA which can be used to evaluate the performance of business units. In this paper, a new method has been proposed for estimating the performance of DMUs with interval data and weights of data. The models proposed in previous studies have interval data or interval weights of data, so the proposed model has more flexibility than previous studies . Thus, innovation has been done theoretically and the experimental part is for testing the theory. Finally, a method is introduced for ranking the DMUs by computed performance. In order to prove the applicability of the proposed method, a case study for ranking of some Iranian automotive companies products is given. The model results indicate that the proposed model will be useful for practical problems, especially when the number of choices is limited.

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This paper aims to determine the optimum price of electricity during restructuring process. We maximized social welfare function subject to market equilibrium, maximum production capacity of each group of power plants, maximum demand of each consumer type and the potential of electricity export and import. The model was run using 2007 monthly and annual data by means of GAMS optimization software. The calculated electricity shadow price for the year 2007 was 371.2 per KWh. To get more exact results we run the model for each month separately. The results show that the price of electricity in spring and summer is lower than fall and winter, for marginal cost of power provision in winter rises. This is due to substitution of gas by gasoil and other liquid fuels and also reduction of hydropower production. For both intervals the actual price has a significant deviation from optimum price in Iranian power market.

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The effect of equivalence scale on poverty line has been considered as a predetermined parameter in all previous studies about the estimation of poverty lines in Iran. As household’s members can benefit from economies of scale in consumption, the cost of reaching to a given level of welfare does not increase one to one in household scale. So the effect of household scale on poverty line as a predetermined parameter creates bias. The main purpose of this study is to estimate the poverty line regarding the household scale. The utility function and the indirect household expenditures under consumption behavior approach are estimated based on income-expenditure data for 204464 Iranian urban households during2001-2007. Then poverty lines (in nominal and real units) per household scale (1to 10 members) are calculated based on indirect household expenditures.

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  In this paper, a small scale Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregressive (FAVAR) Model is utilized to analyze the effects of monetary shocks on price level and economic activities in the Iranian housing sector. To analyze the "price level", four price indices of the housing sector were used and also six indices to estimate the "economic activities" in this sector were determined. The results show that shocks from liquidity and high powered money will have wave-like effects on the housing sector in Iran. The waves have an approximate duration of 5 years which is confirmed by observations of the housing sector in Iran. Also the results show that the effects of the liquidity shocks have more durable effects on the sector in comparison with the high powered money shocks.

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    The number of factors affecting total factor productivity has been increasing far from those which considered in growth models. So, institutional factors have been attracting strong attention of researchers. This paper aims at investigating the effects of these institutional factors together with traditional factors on TFP growth during 1971-2007.

  For this purpose, we present a State-Space model. Using this approach, TFP has been regarded as a latent variable and in the state equation, we introduced some exogenous variables. Some endogenous variables which were mainly measures of institutional factors have been specified as proxies. Our result show that the introduced measures of institutions such as governance(political stability and accountability) institutions and degree of government intervention together with an older and known institutional factors, such as macroeconomic instability, have significant effects on TFP growth. In addition, the residuals from state-space model (either deterministic or stochastic) were different from the residuals of other models.

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According to Taylor (1993) rule, the monetary authority responds to deviations of output and of inflation from their targets through nominal interest rate fluctuations regarded as policy instrument. Another specification that has received considerable attention is that policymakers may have asymmetric preferences with regard to their objectives during recessions and expansions. Since according to Law for Usury (Interest) Free Banking of Iran, the objective of the central bank is not the control of interest rate, instead it is money growth rate which is used as an instrument, in this study we introduce a money growth rate reaction function and we use it to test the asymmetry in central bank behavior during recessions and expansions. The estimation results of a Markov Switching model for the period 1367:1 to 1387:2 show that the central bank sensitivity toward output is more during the recessions while its sensitivity toward inflation is more during the expansions.

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  This study examines the theoretical and empirical aspects of the effect of capital inflow on exchange rate in 14 developing countries for the period 1980-2009. We developed an empirical model to investigate the effects of term of trade, real per capita output and trade openness on real exchange rate using d ynamic and heterogeneous panel and Pool Mean Group (PMG) methods. Estimation results show that various capital inflow channels have different effect on real exchange rate. For non-oil countries, only foreign aid inflow causes exchange rate appreciation in long-run and short-run and creates Dutch disease. In oil exporting countries, oil revenues and foreign direct investment cause exchange rate appreciation and create Dutch disease problems in the long-run. However, an increase in oil revenues in oil exporting countries causes more exchange rate appreciation than an increase in foreign direct investment.

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  In the past decades, a range of discussions has been formed on coalition theory in economics and international sciences. The focus of this discussion is that in the absence of a superior power, and while some players want to expand their authorities, is it possible to cooperate or not. These theories agree on the principle that if such condition be a sequential game, cooperation will be permanent only if the players are patient enough. In the real world, there are many partnerships between groups that don’t have a same patience, i.e. the discount factor isn’t equal for each of the members. OPEC is an example of those groups which composed of members with different discount factor.

  This paper investigates the future of OPEC members and their different discount factors. So, cooperative theory is used to analyze the behavior of OPEC members using panel data techniques. Results show that a fixed effects model is appropriate to explain OPEC member’s behavior. According to the model, the amount of marketed crude oil by members has positive relationship with stocks and sales in the previous period and also there is a negative relationship between the amount of marketed oil and square of proven reserves per capita. The results show that bargaining and negotiation between some members to achieve agreement rapidly and also relents or blackmails guarantees OPEC Survival.