Determination of effective factors of exchange rate regime choice in Iran and other OPEC countries

Selection of the currency system through various economic variables plays a significant role in the future of every society. In addition, many factors influence this choice of a country's currency. Therefore, in this paper we seek to identify and evaluate the impact of these factors on the choice of currency regime in Iran and member of OPEC.
In order to achieve experimental results, data from 1965 to 2012 related to Iran and the OPEC member countries are used and the equations are estimated by two different methods which are probit model and probit random panel model.The results indicate that the most important factor in increasing the probability of choosing a fixed currency system of these countries, is foreign reserves variable. In fact, this finding implies that whenever these countries have adequate reserves to meet its budgetary resources, exchange rate were fixed (Positive correlation between the foreign currency reserves and fixed exchange rate regime). On the other hand, whenever they’ve been faced with a shortage of foreign currency reserves, their exchange rate has been changed (Negative correlation between the foreign currency reserves and fixed exchange rate regime).