پژوهشنامه اقتصادی
پیاپی 81 (تابستان 1400)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of intra-organizational and macro factors affecting banking leverage in selected Iranian banks in the presence of heterogeneous slope coefficients and cross-sectional dependence of residuals. For this purpose, the mean group estimators were used from 1999 to 2018 for selected 10 banks. Diagnostic tests showed that the hypotheses of cross-sectional dependence and heterogeneity of slope coefficients can not be rejected, so, the Augmented Mean Group estimator (AMG) was used. According to the results, the variables of credit risk and liquidity risk have positive and significant effects while the bank size has a negative and significant effect on bank leverage. Among macro and extra-organizational factors, inflation and real interest rates have positive effects and economic growth has a significant negative effect on the financial leverage of selected banks.

The financial crisis of 2007-2009 led to the redoubled attention of international institutions to the issue of banking regulation. In this regard, the Basel Committee to exercise effective banking supervision reviewed and introduced new standards and requirements in the field of banking regulations, such as capital adequacy requirements, providing liquidity requirements, and leverage ratio. On the whole, studies show that capital ratios have significant and negative impacts on large European bank-retail-and-other-lending-growth in a context of deleveraging and “credit crunch” in Europe over the post-2008 financial crisis period. Additionally, liquidity indicators have positive but perverse effects on bank-lending growth, which supports the need to consider heterogeneous banks’ characteristics and behaviors when implementing new regulatory policies. In this article, by using the data of the Iranian banks during 2006-2018, the simultaneous effect of the new liquidity and capital regulations, inspired by the requirements of Basel Committee and based on the new instructions of the Central Bank, has been studied. In other words, the issue addressed in this paper is what conditions the simultaneous implementation of capital and liquidity requirements by banks will put them in. According to the results, liquidity requirements and capital requirements are complementary. Based on the results, the relationship between liquidity risk (Inverse of Net Stable Funding Ratio) and capital adequacy is positive. Therefore, with the increase of liquidity risk in banks, it will not be possible to establish capital requirements following the provisions of Basel III.

The role of deep hapbit in countercyclical behavior of mark-up and its impact on the transmission of monetary and fiscal shocks have already been studied, but its strength in the presence of Philips curve with price stickiness is not clear. The purpose of this study is to develop a New Keynesian Philips Curve (NKPC) following Cristiano et al. (2005), to investigate the simultaneous effect of price stickiness and deep habits on monetary and fiscal shock transmission using Markov- switching stochastic dynamic general equilibrium (MS-DSGE) model for the Iranian economy. The results of impulse-response functions show reducing markup for one period due to deep habits and then increasing markup and inflation after a period due to a stronger role of price stickiness. Moreover, although the negative effect of wealth due to government spending is compensated by deep habits consumption and thus makes consumption increase, it is weak in comparison to the strength of expected inflation, and therefore, inflation increases eventually. Overall, the results of this study indicate that deep habits cannot be a dominant factor in the transmission of monetary and fiscal shocks, but according to the obtained impulse response functions, it can be the strong reason to delay increasing inflation. Also, deep habits consumption can be a good reason for increasing consumption and compensating of the negative effect of wealth due to fiscal shock.

Nowadays, Information and Communications Technology is growing rapidly due to the considerable increase in using knowledge-based theories in all countries, especially in developing economies such as Iran. As a non-competitive technology with unlimited use capacity, Information and Communications Technology entry in the general application and social life shows its potential to affect social welfare. This study will evaluate the impact of Information and Communications Technology on Sen's Social Welfare Index in Iranian provinces using data from 2011 to 2016. The paper uses Feasible Generalized Least Squares method to capture variance heteroscedasticities and cross-section correlations. The results indicate that Information and Communications Technology has a significant and positive effect on Iranian social welfare. Moreover, variables such as industrialization, government spending, and urbanization have a substantial and positive impact on social welfare. The inflation rate, on the other hand, has a significant and negative effect.

The aim of this study is to investigate the impacts of the coronavirus outbreak on Iran’s labor market. To do so, we analyzed changes in key indicators of the labor market in the first four months of the outbreak. In addition, the dynamic effects of COVID-19 are estimated using a vector autoregression model (VAR). Results show that spread of the pandemic has led to an increase innumber of discouraged workers. The participation rate has fallen by 3.7 percentage points, compared to the same period last year. Considering seasonal variations in the labor market, nearly 1.5 million people have lost their jobs due to the coronavirus contagion. Also, around 750 thousand people applied for unemployment benefits which are 60 percent of the claims filed by former service sector employees. The results indicate that during the study period, the increase in confirmed cases of infections increased the number of jobless claims and the number of unemployed persons. Our findings confirm rapid and substantial changes in the Iranian labor market caused by the coronavirus and highlight the necessity of improving the social welfare system for supporting vulnerable groups in the current crisis and future crises. Supporting businesses, especially credit, insurance, etc., can also reduce the problems of businesses and reduce the number of unemployed.

In recent decades, international sanctions have become a common feature of political interactions between governments. In particular, the United States is the country which has imposed the most economic sanctions since World War II. Moreover, several actions have been taken by multilateral organizations like the United Nations in recent years. This study seeks to unveil the effect of UN and US economic sanctions on the misery index in a panel of 41 sanctioned countries during 1991-2018. The model is estimated as unbalanced panel data using the Generalized Least Squares (GLS) method. The results of this study indicate that UN and US sanctions have a significant impact on the misery index. Furthermore, the positive and incremental effect of comprehensive UN economic sanctions on the misery index is greater than that of the United States.