فصلنامه نظریه های کاربردی اقتصاد
سال سوم شماره 4 (پیاپی 11، زمستان 1395)

Participatory or profit-loss sharing (PLS) contracts in Islamic banking have turned into fixed-return (interest-based) contracts which do not comply with the Sharia. Banks enter mostly into participatory contracts with borrowers, and although they estimate the profit they will receive from the contract, they do not consider the surrounding conditions and factors that could affect the contract’s profitability. Thus, by its nature, a participatory contract is one in which clients receive a bank loan and repay that loan at maturity with the minimum expected profit. In short, the participatory contract turns into a fixed-return contract. Using a game theory model, this study attempts to explain why Islamic banks use mostly fixed-return debt financing and the challenges associated with the effective execution of participatory contracts in the presence of adverse selection and costly state verification. We show a significantly higher compliance rate for Sharia-compliant contracts (i.e. participatory or PLS contracts) than for conventional (fixed-return or interest-based) contracts. Our findings provide evidence for why Islamic banks should reconsider using more participatory contracts which could benefit by increasing access to financing and improving compliance rates.

The issue of resource mobilization and how it led to the efficient investment activities is the basic foundations of any economy is growing and developing. the banking system is considered the most important institution in this area and devoted himself a major part of the community funds. so need to design a comprehensive model bank operating in accordance with the terms of the community, seems essential. this study used dynamic stochastic optimization pattern, to maximize the net present value of bank profits by taking control variables (the share of each type of deposit) and considering three indicating stochastic inclusion of stochastic differential equation of lawyer in debt deposit, fixed contracts and participation contracts. results collected from optimum levels of control and status variables shows increase efficiency and reduce costs of each type of deposit, leading to the increasing shift the optimal route, upward and through increased deposit, banks profit also increased. In order to improve performance, sharia compliance and transparency in the functioning of banks, the model presented in this study as a good model for Iranian banking system is suggested.

Food security has been a global problem and has attracted the attention of policy-maker and scientific circles. So, the purpose of this study is calculating food security in provinces and identifying variables that strengthen or stopping it. In this regard, first food security situation of the provinces of Iran during 2006 - 2013 are calculated with multi- sectoral index based on human development index. The result shows that on average provinces of Sistan and Baluchistan, Hormozgan and South Khorasan have worst food security situation and East Azerbaijan, Khorasan and Fars have the highest food security situation. Then examine the impact of economic factors on food security with Dynamic Panel Data method. The result suggests that economic growth index is a positive factor, urbanization and consumption price are negative factors in improving food security index. The result of Sensitivity analysis reinforces the same result.

Due to the importance of production in economy, its volatility affect economic sectors and agents significantly. Therefore, understanding the causes of business cycles is very important. Thus, this study extracted business cycles and investigated the effects of aggregate demand variables cycles in business cycle and the size of this effects in Iran’s economy over 1959-2014. For this purpose, first Hodrick-Prescott filter and then Markov-switching model are used to extract and examine the business cycles. The results showed asymmetry in the production cycles in Iran’s economy. The results of the regime of recession and expansion probability also revealed that although with less intensity, cycles of recession are more probable compared to expansion cycles, and have happened in longer period. Then, using the relevant indicators and Hsiao's causality tests, we focused on the relationship of demand side variables cycle with business cycles. The results indicated that the three variables including consumption, investment and government spending were all leading and coincident to business cycles. There was a two-way causality relationship between all three variables and the business cycles. However, balance of trade was found to be lagging and non-coincident to business cycles. It was also found that the causality runs only from balance of trade to business cycles.

The impact of exchange rate changes on prices called "Exchange Rate Pass-Through (ERPT)" is an important issue in economics. Changes in the exchange rate can affect agricultural product prices through the import prices of raw materials. Also, the dependency of the agricultural exports on the exchange rate can accelerate this relationship. Bearing in mind the strategic position of agricultural products, dealing with the above issue should be highly regarded by the agricultural sector policymakers. The purpose of the present paper is to study the impact of ERPT on the implicit price index of Iran's agriculture sector. It also deals with the possibility of any threshold value for the exchange rate from 1971-2014 .To do so, using time series data from the Central Bank of Iran, Multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (M-GARCH) and Threshold Regression (TR) models have been estimated. The estimation results indicate that the past shocks of nominal exchange rate had a positive impact on the agriculture implicit price index. Also, the findings of the threshold regression estimation show that applying ERPT to implicit price index of agriculture products revealed a threshold value of 9226 Rials. In other words, an increase in the exchange rate higher than the threshold level will cause a much higher increase in the implicit price index of agriculture products in Iran.

Since the major part of oil revenues are control by government and it forms government’s expenditures; therefore, recognition of oil revenues growth shocks and their impacts intensity on macroeconomic variables such as inflation and unemployment is very important for economic policymakers. This study examines the asymmetric effects of oil revenues shocks on misery index in Iran’s economy by using vector error correction method. For this purpose, we use annual macroeconomic data during 1971-2014 periods. The result shows that both positive and negative shocks have a significant and negative effect on misery index and also long-term trend in oil revenues have a positive and significant relationship with misery index. On the other hand, population growth rate, government expenditure and trade openness index as well as influencing variables on misery index in the model were brought that have a positive and significant relationship with misery index. Also according to the Wald test results, the hypothesis of symmetric effects of positive and negative shocks of oil revenues is rejected.

Theoretically speaking, monetary policy transparency refers to the informational symmetry between the central bank and the private sector. High degree of transparency reduces uncertainty, improves the private-sector inference about central bank goals, and increases the effectiveness of monetary policy. This study analyzes the impact of financial and monetary freedom on monetary policy transparency. A set of 102 countries -categorized in low, middle and high income groups have been investigated for the period 1998-2010, since the monetary policy transparency data are not available from 2010 onwards. The panel cointegation test suggests that the long run relationship between variables exists. The empirical findings suggest that while GDP per capita and trade freedom have a positive effect on transparency, the impact of financial freedom on transparency varieties in different income groups. Furthermore the monetary freedom exerts significant positive effect merely on middle income countries. These results imply that the reaction of monetary policy transparency to financial and monetary freedom might be depended to different economic structures.

This paper investigates whether global food price shocks have been affected consumer price index in Iran. For this purpose, we estimate the pass-through of global food price inflation to domestic consumer price index using Markov Switching Vector Auto-Regressive (MS-VAR) and Vector Auto-Regressive (VAR) models and quarterly data from 1990:2 to 2015:1. With respect to the linearity test results, the MS-VAR model has better fit to data than linear VAR model. According to the information criteria statistics, the MSIAH(2)-VAR(1) specification is the chosen kind of MS-VAR model. The results show that the magnitude of global food prices pass-through to the consumer price index in the first and second regime is 0.05 and 0.35 after a year, respectively. Pass-through effect increases in second year that higher in second regime than first regime. The pass-through magnitude in first and second regime is 0.12 and 0.85 after two years, respectively. Because of substantial amount of agricultural inputs and food imports, the Iranian policymakers can limit the pass-through of global prices to domestic prices by applying the inflation targeting policies.