Sharif Digital Repository

In the framework of a household’s collective decision processes, this study presents a structural empirical model to test the hypothesis that child labour is compelled by household’s poverty and parent’s bargaining power against one another. To this end, a measure for mother’s intra-household bargaining power is developed. I use Iranian Household’s Income and Expenditures Surveys (2005 and 2010). Estimation method used in this study is multinomial logit. Findings indicate that household’s poverty is not the sole cause of child’s work incidence. Instead, given the other factors such as poverty, being the first born, local labour market prospect and gender fixed, mother’s bargaining power is... 

Diffusive molecular communications (DiMC) have recently gained attention as a candidate for nano- to micro- and macro-scale communications due to its simplicity and energy efficiency. As signal propagation is solely enabled by Brownian motion mechanics, DiMC faces severe inter-symbol interference (ISI), which limits reliable and high data-rate communications. Herein, recent literature on DiMC performance enhancement strategies is surveyed; key research directions are identified. Signaling design and associated design constraints are presented. Studies on fundamental information theoretic limits of DiMC channel are reviewed. Classical and novel transceiver designs are discussed with an... 

Diffusive molecular communications (DiMC) have recently gained attention as a candidate for nano- to micro- and macro-scale communications due to its simplicity and energy efficiency. As signal propagation is solely enabled by Brownian motion mechanics, DiMC faces severe inter-symbol interference (ISI), which limits reliable and high data-rate communications. Herein, recent literature on DiMC performance enhancement strategies is surveyed; key research directions are identified. Signaling design and associated design constraints are presented. Studies on fundamental information theoretic limits of DiMC channel are reviewed. Classical and novel transceiver designs are discussed with an... 

In this research, a permutation flowshop sequence-dependent group scheduling problem with minimisation of total completion time is considered. Since the problem is shown to be strongly NP-hard, a hybrid genetic (HG) algorithm is proposed. The only available lower bounding (LB) method for the proposed research problem in the literature based on branch and price (B&P) algorithm is also enhanced by proposing efficient method to solve sub-problems and proposing a better branching rule. A statistical comparison shows that both the proposed HG algorithm and the proposed LB have better performance than the other methods from the literature with an average 5.96% percentage gap. [Received 13 December... 

In this research, the flexible flowshop sequence-dependent group scheduling problem with minimisation of makespan as the criterion (FFm|fmls, shgi|Cmax) is investigated. A mixed integer linear mathematical model for the research problem is developed. Since the research problem is shown to be NP-hard, a meta-heuristic algorithm based on memetic algorithm (MA) is developed to efficiently solve the problem. Also, a lower bounding technique based on the developed mathematical model is proposed to evaluate the quality of the proposed MA. The performance of the proposed MA is compared with the existing algorithm in the literature, i.e. tabu search (TS), by solving the available test problems in... 

This paper provides an empirical investigation on the individual labor supply of Iranian spouses in an intra-household collective decision framework in which gender ratio and divorce rate play a central role for resource allocation of household. The dataset is taken from the Households’ Expenditures Survey (2008) and the Annual Statistical Yearbook (2008) of Iran. I have conducted the parameters estimation and hypothesis testing using switching regression technique to catch the presence of the widespread non-participation of spouses across Iranian households. Reduced forms of labor supply are estimated considering the endogeneity of wage rates. The findings show that the unitary model of... 

Circuit breakers, like price limits and trading suspensions, are used to reduce price volatility in security markets. When returns hit price limits or missed, observed returns deviate from equilibrium returns. This creates a challenge for predicting stock returns and modelling value at risk (VaR). In Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE), the circuit breakers are applied to control for the excess price volatilities. This paper intend to address which models and what methodology should be applied by risk analysts to calculate the VaR when the returns are unobservable. To this end, we extend Wei’s (2002) model, in the framework of Bayesian Censored and Missing-GARCH approach, to estimate VaR for a share... 

The recent researches show that value-at-risk (VaR) estimations are biased and is calculated conservatively. Bao and Ullah (2004) proved the bias of an ARCH(1) model for VaR can be decomposed in to two parts: bias due to the returns' misspecification distributional assumption for GARCH(1,1), i.e., (Bias1) and bias due to estimation error, i.e., (Bias2). Using quasi maximum likelihood estimation method this paper intends to find an analytical framework for the two sources of bias. We generate returns from Normal and t-student distributions, then estimate the GARCH(1,1) under Normal and t-student assumptions. Our findings reveal that Bias1 equals to zero for the Normal likelihood function, but... 

Market practitioners and speculators attempt to make benefits from the existence of market price gaps and profit opportunities by arbitrage strategies. Although some investors trade stocks based on the available financial and fundamental information of a particular share, there are others who make profits by risk hedging and swing trading opportunities. One of these strategies is pairs trading, which is a sub-category of statistical arbitrage. Pairs trading can assure reasonably a risk-free profit gaining. This paper aims to make a hypothetical portfolio composed of pairs of stocks by exploring a significant association between their prices in the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX. We compare the...