International Journal of Business and Development Studies
Volume:5 Issue: 1, Spring 2013

This paper examines factors affecting happiness using panel data concerning 58 countries during 2003-2011. Happiness data come in the form of answers to questions such as «How happy are you as a whole in your life?» and the answers range from 1 to 5transformed to obtain a 1-10 scale. Macroeconomics data are from MIT and World Bank 2012 tables. Including 215 total pool observations indicate the negative and significant effect for Inflation and Unemployment while positive and significant for Growth of GDP Per Capita and the Government Expenditure. Controlling these variables Islamic countries are relatively less happy.

On December 2010, the government of Iran ended the decades-long subsidy program for bread and energy products and launched the Targeted Subsidy Reform program that considerably raised prices of food products. The objective of the study was to measure welfare impacts of food price changes on Iranian urban households between two survey data of 2009/10 and 2011/12 which were taken from Iranian household survey (HEIS) raw data. Food consumption behaviour in Iran is analyzed by estimating a complete food demand system using Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (QUAIDS). The elasticity coefficients derived from QUAIDS are used to evaluate impacts of the relative food price changes in terms of Compensated Variations (CV). Based on our estimates, the food groups of meat, edible oils, fruits and dried fruits and Sugary products are luxury goods, with income elasticity above one. Cereals, dairy products, vegetable and pulses, Potables and Spices are necessary goods, as their budget elasticity is positive and below one at the same time. Results showed that all urban households, suffered welfare loses from rise in the food prices during 2009-10 and 2011-12. In addition the high share of cereals in year 2011-12 implies that urban households shift their consumption to cheaper calorie source after implementation of Targeted Subsidy Reform Program. This figure is confirmed with the decline in the share of meat, dairy Products, fruits and dried fruits, vegetables and pulses and potables expenditure.

Central banks have long been interested in obtaining precise estimations of money demand given the fact that the evolution of money demand plays a key role over several monetary variables. One implication of currency substitution is that the exchange rate could serve as another determinant of the demand for money. Due to the recent currency crisis in Iran, it would be important to investigate the phenomenon of currency substitution. By using quarterly data from Iran during 1990Q2 to 2013Q1 and the Generalized Method of Moments approach, we show that exchange rate in addition to real GDP, Inflation, lagged monetary aggregate has effect on the demand for real m2 in Iran. We found that income and lagged monetary aggregate elasticities are positive while the exchange rate elasticity and inflation coefficient are negative. This indicates that inflation and depreciation of domestic currency decreases the demand for money.

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between CPI inflation uncertainty, and private investment in the Iranian economy from 1988 to 2010 by using quarterly data. We employ a bivariate VAR(5)-GARCH(1,1)-in-mean with diagonal BEKK model to discover in a unified framework how are the interactions between the variables. In the model, conditional variance of inflation and private investment are interpreted as inflation and private investment uncertainties, respectively. Our empirical finding shows that, 1) there are bidirectional mean spillovers between inflation and private investment, 2) private investment uncertainty affects private investment negatively, 3) private investment uncertainty doesn’t affect inflation, 4) inflation uncertainty affects inflation positively, and 5) inflation uncertainty affects private investment negatively, supporting Pindyck (1982, 1988, 1991), Caballero (1991), Ferderer (1993a), Caballero and Pindyck (1996).

In the past few years, diversification has turned into a highly controversial issue amongst numerous managers in almost each and every business. It is contended by many that diversification is vitally important and highly effective especially when it comes to evaluating the financial performance. There are several studies about the relationship between diversification and financial performance. However, there is no agreement that diversified firms are more efficient than focus firms. In this paper, the manufacturing firms listed in Bursa Malaysia are ranked based on their efficiency scores calculating by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models and the effect of diversification on the efficiency scores of these corporations have been investigated. Moreover, by slack analysis, the proposed improvement strategies for inefficient firms have been cited. Ultimately, the Malmquist index of productivity (MIP) has been utilized to further comparison and analysis.

The current study aims to investigate the relationship between Iran’s Targeted Subsidies Plan and the stock returns of listed companies on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). Stock returns is obtained from the indices of three industries: pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and machinery and equipment. Moreover, the present research uses gold price and dollar price as control variables. The Targeted Subsidies Plan is the independent variable that takes the value of zero before implementation and one after implementation. Multivariate regression is used for data analysis over the period 2009-2011. The results indicate that there is no relationship between the Targeted Subsidies Plan and market returns. Moreover, paired t-test is applied to verify the results of regression analysis, which rejects the results of the regression model. This is because of the higher accuracy of regression analysis compared to paired t-test which only examines one variable. Therefore, we rely on the results of regression analysis and reject the existence of a significant relationship between the Targeted Subsidies Plan and the stock returns of the studied industries.