فصلنامه پژوهش های اقتصادی ایران
پیاپی 63 (تابستان 1394)

The exchange rate pass-through explains the relationship between changes in national currency and foreign trade of a country, while the responsiveness of trade to the currency changes depends on the perfect or imperfect degree of pass-through.
The objective of this study is to analyze the effect of exchange rate pass-through on inflation in Iran as one of the main oil-exporting countries. To this end, we have specified a Structural Vector Auto-Regressive (SVAR) model including macroeconomic variables such as oil revenues, output gap, free market exchange rate, import prices, producer prices, consumer prices and money supply. To estimate the model, we have used quarterly data over the period 1991:1 - 2012:4.
Empirical results of the model estimation, which are in forms of impulse response functions and variance decomposition, have shown that although the degree of exchange rate pass-through to the price indices has been incomplete, changes in the exchange rate have led to fluctuations in the prices explaining partly Iran’s inflationary situation during the period under consideration. It also reveals the fact that a higher share of imported inflation implies the economy’s dependence on imports.

Ongoing sanctions on Iranian economy have proved to be very harmful and detrimental to Iranian economic affairs and social welfare. Evaluating the unfair impacts of these sanctions on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and social welfare is the aim of this paper. Firstly, we have developed a generalized growth model in the presence of sanctions while treating exchange rate as a random variable. Secondly, three different forms of sanctions are introduced into the model and their bearings on national product and social welfare is studied. The first tier of the sanctions is imposed on consumption, intermediary and capital goods while exchange rate is assumed to have a random behavior. Then sanctions are also imposed on Iranian oil and gas production. We have devised several scenarios using stochastic Hamilton Bellman Jacobian value function (SHBJ) and genetic algorithm optimization methods. Our results of the first and second scenario imply that the level of social welfare is mostly affected by oil and gas sanctions while goods embargo has targeted goods production. The effects of sanctions on GDP and social welfare is represented by a concave curve. This curvature shows that the impact of sanctions on GDP and social welfare is stronger at the beginning than later on when further sanctions are introduced. In the third scenario oil, gas and goods sanctions are imposed simultaneously. Our results also show that the third scenario effects is stronger than the other two. According to the Gross Domestic Product data acquired for year 1390, oil and gas sanctions have lowered the GDP by 30 percent, while the overall reduction in GDP through all sanction collectively is estimated between 30 to 50 Percent.

An Asian option (or average value option) is a special type of option contractý. ýIts payoff is determined by the average underlying price over some pre-set period of time. ýAsian option is hard to price analytically and numericallyý. ýThere is no exact solution for these options in the Black-Scholes environmentý. Lower and upper bounds formula for these options have been derived by Rogers and Shi(1995). This difference between the upper and lower bound is independent of the exercise price. In this paper we develop lower and upper bounds in which the difference between lower and upper bounds depends on the exercise price.

Education is one of the most determinants of consumer welfare. There are, however, many differences in educational achievements among individuals. The aim of this paper is to study the generational impact of education on urban households’ consumer welfare in Iran. To do this, we construct a pseudo-panel data set of individual households from the urban areas for the period 1369-1390. In this way, the performance of cohorts over time is observed. The results show that greater access to education is associated with more consumer welfare.

Recent technological advances have increased the importance of human capital over the past years. In this paper, we study the impact of human capital on economic growth in Iran using the nonlinear STR method for the period 1345-1389. To this end, we estimate a two regime Logistic Smooth Transition Dynamic Regression (LSTR) model in which the transition variable is the logarithmic change in human capital. The results show that the impact of human capital on growth is different in two regimes. In the first regime, if the human capital growth rate is below the threshold value, the effects of human and physical capital on economic growth will be negative and positive, respectively. In the second one, human capital has positive and significant impact on economic growth. The main conclusion of the study is that it is crucial to take the type of regime into account.

The aim of this study is to investigate the long memory properties along with structural breaks in the returns of the TEPIX. For this purpose, the properties of the long memory in the daily returns for three periods leading to September 23, 2013 were evaluated using semi- and non-parametric methods. The results show the existence of long memory properties in all periods which may be misleading due to the ignorance of possible structural breaks. Therefore, this paper considers the properties of long memory in the presence of structural breaks using the Bai and Perron test (1998, 2003). In order to examine the null hypothesis of long memory against the alternative of a structural break, we employ the Shimotsu test (2006). In contrast to past findings, we find that the long memory properties of TEPIX are sensitive to the period of analysis. The results suggest that one should be careful about the inference of long memory in the presence of structural breaks or regime changes.