reza najarzadeh

In international trade and financial exchanges, global cryptocurrencies have a prominent and effective role. In this paper, using the KOF index, the structure of financial globalization is extracted and the effect of the expansion of global cryptocurrencies is examined in the two components:  Foreign Direct Investment and Portfolio Investment. The Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model has been used separately for 2020, 2021, and 2022 to analyze the results of the expansion of global cryptocurrencies in the foreign direct investment component. Also, the price changes of Bitcoin and Ethereum from March 10, 2016, to the end of December 2022 have been used to investigate the effect of global cryptocurrencies in portfolio investment by applying Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). Also, according to the availability of data in research sources, the data of 111 countries have been used. OLS estimated results suggest that the adoption and expansion of global cryptocurrencies has no significant relationship with Foreign Direct Investment. Also, using MPT, the results of portfolio optimization suggest that global cryptocurrencies improve the effectiveness of the selected portfolios, and with the same corresponding returns, the risk of the portfolios including global cryptocurrencies decreases as well. Therefore, the results emphasize the role of global cryptocurrencies in financial globalization only as crypto-assets.

Financing is very important for businesses. Initial Coin Offering is a new way of financing businesses based on blockchain technology. It seems necessary to explain this method and calculate its success factors. Therefore, in this article, using the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm, we have investigated the factors affecting the success of initial coin offering campaigns among 307 projects from 2016 to the end of 2018. In this article, the effect of the characteristics of the project, campaign, social networks and the team in a cumulative process on the two target variables- the total amount raised in the ICO process, and the percentage of hard cap (maximum capital determined by the founders of the project) raised as success criteria- have been examined in two separate model series. By obtaining the optimal models based on their performance and prioritizing the features using the Lasso technique, this article shows the two features of "Token supply is fixed" and "availability of smart contract code" have the highest level of influence in the success of an Initial Coin offering According to the results of both optimal models.

The entanglement of economies or the integration of world economies is increasingly taking place today. In the shadow of contemporary technological developments, the adoption and expantion of cryptocurrencies will undoubtedly bring challenges and benefits. These developments have had significant effects on the global economy, especially international trade and finance. In this research, using the KOF index, the structure of economic globalization is extracted and the effect of the expansion of global cryptocurrencies is examined in two dimensions: international trade and international finance. OLS and GLS estimated results in 2019, 2020 and 2021 suggest that the adoption and expansion of global cryptocurrencies has no significant relationship with the index of international trade and foreign direct investment. Also, using Modern Portfolio Theory, the results of portfolio optimization suggest that global cryptocurrencies improve the effectiveness of the selected portfolios, and with the same corresponding returns, the risk of the portfolios including global cryptocurrencies decreases as well. Therefore, the results emphasize the role of cryptocurrencies in economic globalization only as crypto-assets.

The challenge of employment or the issue of unemployment is not only considered one of the most important social issues of the day in the country, but considering the rate of population growth in the past two decades, it can also be considered the most important economic-social challenge of the next few decades. On the other hand, in the last hundred years, the world has seen different economic and non-economic crises, such as the 2008 American financial crisis and the spread of the C ovid-19. The economic policies used to overcome the crisis have been different according to the time period and the depth of the recession resulting from the crisis, the reasons for the occurrence of the crisis and the extent of the crisis in different countries. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to analyze the country's tax policies during the outbreak of the covid-19 on the employment level of the country: the Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium approach during the years 1397 to 1400. The findings of this research indicated that the shock of Corona caused a 50% decrease in employment in the service sector. The decline in employment affects the borrowers sector and reduces their consumption by almost 10%. This decrease in the consumption of the non-service sector has also led to a decrease in employment in other sectors by 4 percent. In turn, these interactions lead to a 10 percent decrease in GDP. In order to investigate the effect of the government's tax policies on macroeconomic variables, especially the level of employment during the outbreak of the Corona virus, a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model has been designed for the Iranian economy in the form of three scenarios facing the government. After specifying the model, optimizing and obtaining the first-order condition of the economic factors, the results of the calibration indicate that the effect of the government's financial policies on the macroeconomic variables under all three scenarios are almost the same and are in accordance with the theoretical expectations of the economy. The increase in government spending has helped to maintain employment in the non-service sector, and the reduction of taxes by maintaining the income of borrowers leads to a decrease in unemployment and a decrease in default rates. Based on this, it is suggested that the government reduce the harmful effects of the spread of the corona virus by adopting better financial policies, especially in the field of taxation, so that the level of employment and other macroeconomic variables reach their stable status.

At the current time, the aggravation of the problem of stagflation in the country has caused more emphasis on all policies of the supply-side, and on top of that, the financing of entrepreneurs with an emphasis on reducing inflation. The initial coin offering method is a new method for financing businesses based on blockchain technology, which realizes the possibility of attracting high capital in a short time compared to other methods. In the meantime, small and medium-sized enterprises that, despite the need for small levels of resources, have an undeniable role in production of Countries, can be good candidates for applying this method. The explanation of this method and the identification of factors affecting its success to solve the existing information gaps can provide the process of perfect use and benefiting from its potentials. Therefore, in this article, by collecting 307 ICO in 2016 to the end of 2018, the factors influencing their success-include the characteristics of the team, project, campaign and social networks- in a cumulative process by Random Forest algorithm has been investigated. In the recent article, the total raised capital and Percentage of hard cap raised has been considered as a criterion of success in two series of separate models. By dividing the level of priority of the features into three levels, the findings show that three features of the total number of project tokens, the number of white paper pages, the clarity of the team's share of the token have the priority of level one and have the highest role in the success of an ICOs campaign.

Regarding the importance of knowledge-based capital in the modern economy, this paper aims to measure this kind of capital in Iran’s manufacturing sector using the exploratory factor analysis method. Data include active firms in Iran’s manufacturing sector at the 2-digit ISIC level over the period 2002-2018. The results indicate the existence of a factor in the manufacturing firms with a positive and increasing trend of knowledge-based capital accumulation. The findings also show that the accumulation of this type of capital in Iran’s manufacturing sector is in the early stages of development and highly depends on the literate labor force.

AbstractThe capital market in every country is one of the most prominent economic sectors of that country. The capital market reflects the economic outcome of the country, and its success and weakness can represent the economic situation in that country. In the meantime, the impact of macroeconomic indicators on the capital market, especially the Tehran Stock Exchange, is one of the issues that illustrates the role of macroeconomic policies in predicting the capital market. Our country has huge oil and gas reserves and is one of the main exporters of these energy sources in the world. One of the most important industries active in this field is the petrochemical industry and the oil refining industry and distribution of oil products, which accounts for a significant portion of transactions. These industries are heavily influenced by large -scale indicators, especially the exchange rate because of their dependence on fuel and oil food; Therefore, this study seeks to investigate the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on the performance of active companies in the field of energy. In this regard, to examine this work of monthly exchange rates, inflation, gold prices, and oil prices from the Central Bank and the Ministry of Economy and Finance, as well as the price index of active energy companies in Tehran Stock Exchange for December 2008 Used until March 1977 and the ARDL method has been used to estimate it. The results show the positive and significant relationship between the exchange rate and the performance index of the petrochemical industry and the product industry; That is, the increase in the exchange rate has led to the increase in the stock price of these companies.

The purpose of this study, regarding the characteristics of an oil economy such as Iran, is to choose the Ramsey optimal monetary policy and appropriate exchange rate system. The model includes Ricardian and non-Ricardian households, nominal rigidity (in price level and wages) and real rigidity (in consumption), public goods, oil and non-oil exports, different exchange systems (float, managed floating, and fixed), and different targets in the real and monetary sector for the central bank. Also, the consequences of implementing the Ramsey optimal monetary policy versus the current state of the country were examined. Finally, the effects of oil prices shocks, foreign inflation shock, money supply shock, and nominal exchange rate growth shocks on macro variables under the base model and Ramsey’s optimal monetary policy were examined. The results show that, first, the central bank should choose and commit to the managed floating exchange rate system among different exchange systems and dual-targeting (production and inflation with more focus on production) among different targeting policies. Although the fixed exchange rate system has a much smaller loss function than others, it is not feasible due to the instability of the economy. Second, the central bank’s commitment to an optimal policy makes the monetary and real sectors of the economy much less volatile and much more stable versus monetary and foreign currency shocks compared to the base model. In faced with external shocks, Ramsey’s optimal monetary policy gives more stability to the real sector of the economy in lieu of more volatility and stability in monetary variables.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of adding a non-Ricardian household to a DSGE model in choosing the Ramsey optimal monetary policy and consequently the effects on macroeconomic variables (such as output gap, consumption gap, inflation, and rising nominal exchange rate). Therefore, after estimating a model for the Iranian economy, the Ramsey optimal monetary policy was selected from 6 monetary policy alternatives. Then, in two scenarios, a non-Ricardian household is added to the model. In the first scenario, the non-Ricardian household consists of 20% of households and in the second, it consists of 40% of households. Then, Ramsey optimal monetary policy was selected for these two scenarios. The results show that the when the percentage of non-Ricardian households in the model increases, monetary policy-maker deviates from targeting monetary variables and gives more importance to production targeting. Second, if Ramsey optimal monetary policy is chosen without considering the non-Ricardian household in the model, in facing the shock of falling oil prices, the shock of declining money demand and the shock of rising external inflation, the responses of the production and consumption sectors in scenarios 1 and 2 are significantly different from the baseline model. But the consumption and production sectors have almost the same reactions in three models in response to the shock of the rising nominal exchange rate.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the foreign exchange market pressure (EMP) and the impact of domestic and foreign variables in such markets to access the direct intervention of central banks in these markets in selected oil-exporting countries (Iran, Russia, Norway, and Mexico) during1997/1-2017/4, Using the VECM and VAR model. The results show that the general situation of the foreign exchange market in Iran and Russia is the appreciation of the national currency and in Mexico and Norway is neutral. Most of the direct interventions of the Central Bank of Iran are under Leaning Against the Wind, by contrast, the other countries' are normal. For Russia, fluctuations in real GDP, for Iran, fluctuations in domestic interest rates, and for Mexico and Norway, fluctuations in domestic and U.S. interest rates affect the EMP. In addition, to explain the level trend of EMP by its shock for each country, for Russia, real GDP shocks, and for Mexico, U.S. interest rates shocks and U.S. GDP shocks also explain the level trend of EMP. The central bank direct interventions of all countries except Norway reacted significantly to the oil price shocks, which can be interpreted that the Norwegian Oil Revenue Fund has succeeded in maintaining independence the central bank direct interventions from global oil market fluctuations.

This study aims to investigate poverty risk and inequality decomposition based on the education level of Iranian urban household heads in 2017. A logistic regression model is estimated with the poverty status of households as a dependent variable, a set of control variables (gender and age), and the education level of household heads as explanatory variables. We also use the Gini decomposition as appropriate inequality decomposition for selected provinces. These provinces are categorized based on whether they are deprived or non-deprived provinces using the Council of Ministers guidelines. The findings show that the poverty risk of families in both deprived and non-deprived provinces as well as the country as a whole decrease when the education level of the household head increases. The marginal effect of the first level of education is higher than other levels. Therefore, one can conclude that Iran is more similar to less developed countries. We also show that being a male household head reduces the poverty risk of families in Iran, but the gender of household heads has no significant effect in the selected provinces. In addition, the poverty risk in higher age groups is lower than that of other age groups. Based on the Gini decomposition reports, the highest level of inequality is observed in Sistan and Baloochestan province which suffers from the highest level of unemployment and illiteracy rates in Iran. Finally, inequality decomposition confirms the crucial role of education in explaining inequality.

Along with the increased trade integration of countries and the expansion of international production fragmentation, Global Value Chains (GVCs) amount to a huge part of trade today, and participation in a network of trade partners at downstream and upstream of the value chains brings about considerable potentials such as the improvement of the flow of knowledge and more advanced production technologies and techniques, particularly for developing countries. It would not be unexpected for GVCs and participating in them from an environmental aspect to have potential benefits for countries as well.
In this regard, the present study discusses the role that GVCs play in countries' environmental performance. For this purpose, a sample of 65 developing and 36 developed countries was investigated using spatial panel data econometrics, conditional convergence, spatial auto-correlation, and GVCs participation spillover and direct impacts for countries in the form of south-south, north-south, and north-north bilateral added-value trade. The results indicated that there was spatial auto-correlation and conditional convergence based on GVCs for all countries although they are more intense in the case of north-north trade in developed countries. Besides, participation in GVCs has spillover impacts on the trading partner countries if developed countries are included in the bilateral value-added trade but this impact is not statistically acceptable in south-south trade of developing countries according to estimations. Thus, establishing trading relations with developed countries through GVCs is a potentially beneficial policy to improve developing countries’ environmental performance.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the situation of foreign exchange market pressure and the effect of domestic and foreign variables on it and to investigate the direct intervention of the central bank in the foreign exchange market in two periods of shortage and abundance in oil revenue. For this purpose, using the VECM and quarterly data of Iran-US economy from 1990.1 to 2017.4, exchange market pressure index and central bank direct intervention index were calculated and the manner of the direct intervention of the central bank in each season in the foreign exchange market was determined. Then, using the VAR model, the effect of domestic and foreign variables on the exchange market pressure index was investigated. The results show that firstly, the predominant situation of the foreign exchange market in the period of shortage in oil revenue is appreciation in the exchange rate, and in the period of abundance in oil revenue is depreciation in the exchange rate. Secondly, the Central Bank has tried to reduce the supply surplus created in the foreign exchange market and prevent the exchange rate from depreciating during the period of abundance in oil revenues by leaning against the wind interventions and purchasing foreign exchange. Third, in the period of abundance in oil revenue compared to the period of shortage in oil revenue, the relationship among the factors affecting exchange rate fluctuations and the exchange market pressure index has decreased. Therefore, the exchange rate is expected to jump in the long run.

Efficiency is a fundamental concept in economics and is applied in various economic areas. In microeconomics, efficiency has a particular role in consumption and production. The focus of this article is on production efficiency, which itself consists of many kinds. In the economics literature, the important question is that how much the current economic situation is away from the efficient situation and, in other words, what the extent of inefficiency is. Statistical facts and evidence clearly show that the Islamic Republic of Iran's economy suffers from a relatively high level of inefficiency in its various sectors, which can be induced from different factors including big size of the public sector, governmental controls in various economic sectors, deviation of domestic relative prices from the world relative prices, untargeted protective system, old technologies, widespread corruption, and economic rents and lack of competitiveness of domestic outputs. Although economic justice should not be sacrificed for increasing efficiency, it seems that the efficiency itself has been sacrificed during the last four decades of IR Iran's economic life. The economy has not been on the right path to deliver sustainable economic growth. Too much emphasis on the issue of economic justice in the last two decades and ignoring the issue of efficiency have been misleading. It seems that the investigation of efficiency in various economic sectors and identification of its determinants are essential for future financial planning. Various kinds of efficiency cannot be dealt with in one article. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to estimate resource allocation inefficiency in the Iranian industrial sector.  

For this purpose, we calculate in the first stage the deviations in each sub-sector of the industry. Then in the second stage, we estimate inefficiencies in 23 industries with two-digit ISIC codes over 1374-1393. 

The empirical results derived from the stochastic frontier function show that the industry's efficiency in the production sector is about 60 percent.  Also, due to increasing returns to scale in the Iranian industry, marginal and average production costs are decreasing, and production does not occur in economic areas.  Therefore, firms operating in Iranian industries are not profit maximizers and have not reached an efficient production scale. Our estimated stochastic frontier function also shows that the labor force is an essential part of efficiency deviation in our calculations.  Therefore, it is necessary to promote labor quality through learning-by-doing as well as technical and professional education to increase their share and create incentives.  

This aim can be reached by linking labor force compensation and wages to its productivity. Also, it is necessary to investigate and evaluate the influential factors causing inefficiency in various economic sectors to design economic policies to eliminate or at least reduce these factors.

Wagner's Law states that the relative size of public sector increases with the growth of per capita income. This study examines whether there is empirical evidence that Wagner’s law holds in the Iranian economy using time series annual data over the period 1985-2018 in Iran, applying cointegration and vector error correction modelling (VECM) techniques. In particular, this study provides a special focus on examining the validity of the versions of Wagner’s hypothesis, which supports the existence of long-run relationship between public expenditure and economic growth. The results of the estimates demonstrate that this law holds in Iran. The elasticity of the government expenditures with respect to national income must be greater than one for the Wagner’s law to hold. However, government’s spending on health and education has been less than expected. Therefore, considering all the government’s spending, Wagner's law is valid in Iran. On the other hand, by examining government expenditures in health and education sector as the most important part of the government expenditures, it is seen that the revenue elasticity of government expenditures in the health and education sectors is less than one. Accordingly, our estimates for Iran do not confirm this law. Although the absolute size of the public sector grows when the income increases, its rate of growth in these sectors is substantially lower than the growth of income. This could suggest that the government does not pay enough attention to health and education sectors and that these are not priorities of the government.

The occurrence of currency crises in recent decades has been one of the problems of the international monetary system. These crises impose heavy costs on the country where they occur and even other countries. For this reason, in recent years, systems for early warning of these crises have been developed to prevent the occurrence of such crises by their early detection and providing sufficient time for policymakers. Meanwhile, Iran's economy has faced several currency crises in the post-revolutionary years and has incurred heavy costs. Under these circumstances, designing an early warning system for currency crises in the Iranian economy can bring many benefits. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to design an early warning system for currency crises in Iran. Based on it, the endogenous crises that occurred in the period under review were identified. Using this system, it is possible to predict future crises and identify the factors affecting the occurrence and intensification of these crises separately in periods of tranquil and crisis.

In order to achieve the above goals, this article used the Markov-switching approach and the quarterly data of the Iranian economy during a period from February 1988 to March 2016. For this purpose, first the components of the designed early warning system, i.e. the dependent variable and the leading indicators of the crisis, were introduced. Afterwards, to estimate the model, first the unit root tests of the variables were used, and then the early warning system was estimated based on the Markov-switching approach in periods of tranquil and crisis. Finally, after diagnostic tests, the in-sample and out-of-sample prediction performances of the system were investigated and the characteristics of periods of tranquil and crisis were studied.

The results indicate that the designed system has a high ability to identify the past crises and anticipate future crises in the Iranian economy. Also, according to the results, in tranquil states, the increase of inflation rate, international reserves to foreign debt ratio, M2 to international reserves ratio, growth of foreign exchange earnings from oil exports and growth of domestic credit have positive and significant effects on the index of foreign exchange market pressure and the greater probability of a currency crisis. But in these tranquil states, the increase in the ratio of foreign exchange earnings to international reserves as well as the growth of industrial production has had negative and significant effects on this index. In other words, they have helped to prevent the occurrence of the currency crisis. Moreover, based on these results, in the crisis states, an increase in the inflation rate, the ratio of international reserves to foreign debt, M2 to international reserves ratio and budget balance to real gross domestic product ratio, with positive and significant effects on the foreign exchange market pressure, will intensify such crises. Of course, if a currency crisis occurs, the increase in the ratio of foreign exchange earnings to international reserves, the growth of domestic credit, the growth of industrial production and growth of real gross domestic product will help improve the crisis state. Finally, based on these results, in the tranquil states, inflation is the most important warning indicator and also the most important factor in increasing the probability of a currency crisis. The growth of industrial production is also the main factor reducing the probability of the crisis. Also, in the crisis states, inflation is the most important factor to intensify the crisis, while the ratio of foreign exchange earnings to international reserves and growth of real gross domestic product are the most important factors in improving the crisis state respectively.

Based on the early warning system designed for the Iranian economy, the occurrence of currency crises and the intensification of crisis states in Iran are due to a set of macroeconomic imbalances. These imbalances and the problems in the monetary, financial and foreign sectors as well as dependence on oil revenues have provided the basis for currency crises in the Iranian economy. However, the results showed that it is possible to deal with the occurrence of a currency crisis in Iran with policies such as inflation control, strengthening and proper management of foreign exchange resources, controlling liquidity growth, managing domestic credit, supporting industrial production, strengthening gross domestic product and controlling the government budget deficit. Also, it is possible to control the critical situation in the event of a currency crisis with such policies.

These days almost all the countries around the world are struggling with coronavirus outbreak. This virus made a lot of challenges in almost all aspects of societies including the economy, transportation, education, etc. If the governments and public health care systems donchr(chr('39')39chr('39'))t take any action against this outbreak, it would have severe effects on human life, now and in the future. By doing so, there are several intervention strategies that could be implemented and as the result, the societies become more secure from the casualties of this virus. In this paper, we used a mathematical model of coronavirus epidemic transmission and by use of some LMIs, a robust LPV controller is designed which helps us to choose and use the intervention methods, effectively. The model of a coronavirus contains some uncertainties with some states and parameter values. So, by use of the proposed robust controller, the robustness and stability of the model against a wide range of uncertainties are approved. Then, we compare the results of an uncontrolled system with the controlled system and also the optimal control problem, to observe the effects of our controller on the system. The final objective of this control design is to minimize the number of exposed and infected individuals in the compartmental model. In the end, it can be seen that the control strategies which are preventive action, good medical care, and sterilization of the environment can highly reduce the negative effects of the coronavirus.

​Global value chains are a complex product of the international fragmentation of production expansion that has revolutionized the production organization of the global economy and increased trade in services and intermediary goods. This new form of trade has allowed developing countries to benefit from international trade with specialization and comparative advantage in tasks, without having a comparative advantage in an entire industry. Given the increasing importance of global value chains, the goal of this paper is to analyze the position of the Iranian economy in the global value chains for 1990-2015. For this purpose, using the UNCTAD-EORA World Input-Output Tables, the indices of participation, position and length of value chain are calculated for the Iranian economy and its 24 sectors. The results show that the Iranian economychr('39')s forward integration into global value chains has increased, but its backward integration has reduced and Iran’s economy has moved to the upstream of value chain. Moreover, for a benefit from global value chains, Iran is pursuing a competing path, in polluting and energy-intensive sectors such as the oil, mining, petrochemical and metal industries, and its considerable capacity in the service sectors remains neglected.

This study presents the new hybrid network of GARCH family and an artificial neural network to predict the Tehran Stock Exchange index during the period of 2008-2017. The existence of long-term memory in the conditional variance of the Tehran stock returns causes use in addition GARCH and EGARCH models with short- memory, long-term memory models. In addition to long-term memory models, considering the better performance of hybrid models in predicting financial data of the Garch family models (short and long-term) are combined with the artificial neural network. Using hybrid models the return of stock index was forecast for the next 10 days and its accuracy was evaluated using the evaluation criteria. The results showed that the hybrid FIEGARCH with the student-t distribution model was more efficient in forecasting return of stock and had a lower forecast error than others models

One of the major problems in the international monetary system is the frequent occurrence of currency crises in different countries. Considering the high cost of currency crises on the economies, designing models for exploring the costs and incidence manner of such crises in the economy can be important. So, we attempted to investigate the implied costs of currency crises and the manner of the crises incidence in the Iranian economy, using bounds testing approach, quarterly data of the Iranian economy during the period 1988:02-2016:02 and an early warning model with a continuous dependent variable. Based on the results, on the one hand, the increase in the ratio of central bank claims on the government to the monetary base and the ratio of central bank claims on the banks to the monetary base, and on the other hands, the decline in the industrial production growth, the growth of oil export earnings, the ratio of earnings from oil exports to foreign assets of the central bank and the ratio of loans to banks' deposits have had resonator effects on the incidence of currency crises in the Iranian economy. Also,  oil and banking comprehensive sanctions from the third quarter of 2012 has led to a significant increase of currency crises incidence in the Iranian economy. Under these circumstances, policymakers, through strengthening foreign exchange earnings and resources and diversifying the sources of foreign exchange, supporting the increase in industrial production, controlling the share of central bank claims on government and banks in the monetary base, and also helping to increase the ability to pay loans and improving the performance of the lending system of banks, can help to prevent the possible occurrence of currency crises and the incidence of such crises in the economy.

The concentration of fossil fuel resources in specific geographic regions of the world and the strategic nature of fuel as a tradable commodity has created an intertwined and complex network of trade relationships among importing and exporting countries of fuel. In this research, using Graph Theory, the topology of the fuel trade network in 1995 and 2017 is analyzed and the position and significance of the main actors of the fuel trade were evaluated. The results show that the fuel trade network is a fully connected network with different growth patterns of trade clusters. It was also observed that countries with higher export share do not necessarily have a greater influence on the volume of fuel trade. While increasing the share of fuel trade, countries tend to trade beyond trade clusters. We also found that changes in trade clusters indicate a more regionalized trade in fuel. Finally, the results show a decrease in Iran's influence in fuel trade.

Research and development expenditure is a key indicator of resources allocated to science and technological activities, so knowledge about its features and factors underlying firm decision about R&D expenditures have great importance. According to international comparisons, R&D intensity in Iranian manufacturing firms is low compared to developing countries and emerging-market economies. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to analyze factors determining R&D intensity in Iranian manufacturing firms. Using data covering 1995-2014 based on two-digit ISIC data of Iranian manufacturing firms, we have developed a panel-data model to analyze R&D intensity. Our results show that high-tech companies with higher ratio of human resources with tertiary education are more open to foreign trade, have greater size and also have higher ratio of investment to value-added. The results show that profitability of high-tech companies and their value-added growth have no significant effect on their decision to make R&D activities. In mid- and low-technology companies, none of explanatory variables has significant effect on R&D intensity. This shows that these industries in Iran are not developed enough to be sensitive about R&D in their strategies. Based on these results and considering very different variables that affect decisions of companies about R&D, it is necessary to implement different policies for industries with different level of technology.

This paper uses Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimation, gravity model, and dynamic panel data to evaluate the effect of the imposed sanctions against Iran on the value of the bilateral trade of agricultural products between Iran and its trading partners among the MENA and the EU countries during 2000 to 2014. The results show that the sanctions have had no effects on the trade flows between Iran and the MENA countries. However, they have meaningful impact on the Iran’s agricultural export to the EU countries, albeit they have caused a decrease in Iran’s agricultural import from this area. The annual precipitation in Iran, as a control variable, using in this paper has positive effects on the Iran’s agricultural export to the EU contries, nonetheless has negative effects on the Iran’s import from the mentioned countries. The overall country size of two trading partners’ variable has meaningful and direct effects on the mutual trade between Iran and the EU countries. According to the above outcomes, the imposed sanctions should be considered as an apportunity to the Iranian agricultural development and diversification of exports from the agriculture sector to the EU region as a wide range of non-oil products to compensate some of the costs on the Iranian economy caused by sanctions.
JEL: F14, F15

Financial derivatives are new instruments through which hedging, investment and arbitrage are done in a modern economy. Although the word 'derivative' primarily reminds us of options and futures, the major focus of the equity derivatives industry worldwide is on index derivatives. Launching index options and index futures in Tehran Stock Exchange, not only increases financial market depth and financial instrument variety, but also provides investors with instruments to hedge their portfolios and helps foreign investor attractions. Also, these financial instruments enhance the information about future prices and thus help market participants to improve their planning for future. However, there is no Sharia compliant solution for index derivatives yet. This paper introduces stock portfolio futures and options. At the beginning of the contract, this portfolio and its combination are clear and physically deliverable. So, stock portfolio futures is a financial contract obligating the buyer to purchase the underlying portfolio of stocks at a predetermined future date and price and the seller to sell this portfolio. Besides, stock portfolio options are a privilege sold by one party to another, that gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to buy (call) or sell (put) a portfolio of stocks at an agreed-upon price within a certain period or on a specific date. The described portfolio is so designed to track the underlying index; thus, all functions of index derivatives may be achieved by launching stock portfolio futures and options.

The increasing global realization of natural gas as a relatively abundant energy is evident from available data on increasing share of natural gas in meeting world energy requirements. India is one of the countries whose dependence on imported gas are constantly increasing. With large population and growing economy, this country is a main natural gas importer. In this paper, game theory is used to model how to enter Iran, Russia and Qatar into the natural gas market in India. Due to information available for all players, each player guesses his rival strategy, and does not wait for his action. Thus, this game is assumed to be of static nature with perfect information.
Nash equilibrium solution was applied to the game among the three countries. Each player has two strategies: (1) to maintain the current market strategy and (2) the market development strategy (to enter Indian natural gas market). Due to rational behavior of three players, the equilibrium is obtained through the market development strategy. In equilibrium, players do not get the best outcome (Nash equilibrium is a balanced equilibrium, which is not established necessarily in a situation where the players have the greatest outcomes.