Sharif Digital Repository

In this research, the effect of political system on economic performance of resource abundant countries is studied. We use political economy litreture to develop a theoritical model in this issue. Here, the politcal systems are divided to democracy and dictatory and in each of them other institutional variable will be introduced. Policy indicator is based on the difference between social welfare in each situation and its optimal amount when maximized. We show that if democracy does not come with high accountability it reduces social welfare more than dictatory. Also, if politician are myopic, democracy aggravates economic performance in those countries. In addition, easy access to income... 

Findings of economics in last decade shows that social and economic institutions have direct influence on economic performance of a society. However, these institutions are determined by the state. In different regimes, the political power is in the hand of different social groups with different preferences and goals; as a result, different social and economic policies and institutions are take place in different political regimes. In this research, we study economic performance of a society under control of two different political regimes: in first, the majority rules the state and in second, there is a totalitarian regime in which; the political power is concentrated in hand of a group of... 

The role of government in economy has been a controversial subject in economics. Lately, there has been some fundamental change in evaluating this subject. One could mention two of these as 1) realizing the importance of micro-founded macro model for evaluating policy, and 2) taking into consideration the rent-seeking behavior of politicians. In this research, a general equilibrium in a micro-founded macro model will be discussed and then in political economics framework, the effect of government on this equilibrium will be investigated. Only the redistribution role of government has been considered. First, the model in which a benevolent government is seeking optimal policy is Discussed.... 

The notable share of housing sector in GDP (approximately five percent) shows this sector’s relation with macroeconomic activities. On the other hand, House as an asset leads housing sector to be affected by monetary and fiscal variables. A dynamic panel data was used in this study to evaluate the relations between housing sector and some macroeconomic variables in metropolises of Iran. As results show, in long term growth of liquidity, GDP per capita and sharp ratio have positive effects, and land per capita has negative effect on housing price in metropolises of Iran. Price increases have not been equal in different cities. Inequality of land price between metropolises and between... 

Gini coefficient is the most prevalent index for the measurement of inequality and is usually extracted by means of nominal variables based on income or expenditures of households. In this study we have extracted more accurate Gini coefficients. By using the raw data of Households Budget Survey (HBS) and STATA software, a special CPI for each household of the sample is extracted. Subsequently nominal expenditures are deflated by these special CPIs, and at last, Gini coefficients are extracted from real expenditures. Our findings indicate that in recent years, extracted Gini coefficients are remarkably higher than prevailing ones.
 

In this research, an Index of Iran informal economy in response to the government interventions in credit, labor and product markets is stimated by EMIMIC model. To do this, first these interventions are measured using principal components analysis. In the model, the variables GDP and employment are used as indicators and taxation rates, government distortions in credit, labor and product markets, government expenditure, per capita income, unemployment and inflation as causes of the informal economy. We conclude these government interventions have affected Iran informal economy and their influence is more than indirect interventions influence such as taxation. The estimated index of Iran... 

Economic performance of resource rich countries is related to their political systems. In this research, consistent to Hosseini (1388), we develop a theoretical model in which we classify the political systems of those countries to four systems based on corruption, myopic behavior of the incumbent, ideological bias of people, and the popularity shocks in elections. We show that in a fixed institutional framework, democracy leads to higher welfare for people and better economic performance. However, in a society with low corruption, high political convergence, and low popularity shocks both democracy and dictatorship maximize the social welfare in the model  

The simplest definition of Total Factor Productivity is the rate of converting inputs to outputs. In other words, with fixed inputs and a raise in the Total Factor Productivity, more output can be achieved. In this study, we review the existing methods for calculating this variable and its determining factors. On the basis of Diewert’s criteria, Fisher index is known to be the most appropriate indicator to calculate production, price and productivity indices. Fisher index is obtained by dividing the index of output to input in which in addition to values of output and input, price data are also used. Between prices and values used in this calculation only price series for wages are not... 

Exchange rate is one of the macroeconomic variables that can affect domestic product, economic growth and unemployment. Since macroeconomics wants to explain inflation, unemployment and economic growth, exchange rate is one of the most important macroeconomic variables. In economic literature, many studies have been performed to investigate the linkage between Real Exchange Rate (RER) and other real economic variables (such as domestic product, unemployment, etc.). In this study, we first construct the RER for the economy of Iran and then, using Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), short-run and long-run relations between RER and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is evaluated.
The results of... 

The low performance of the natural resource economies in terms of economic growth has been considered in different fields of social sciences recently. Variety of policies suggested escaping from this phenomenon with respect to different standpoints. In this research, based on a theoretical approach, we tried to model the leader and people’s behavior in resource rich countries with political economics viewpoint and rational players. The contribution of this research is the introduction of state owned enterprises (SOE) as a basis to resource curse, which has not been considered precisely before. In our model, we have two players (leader, people), two alternatives for resource allocation... 

In this thesis, a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model under new-Keynesian assumptions has been proposed for the economy of Iran, as a major oil-exporting economy. The economy is supposed to be inhabited by households, firms (both final-good and intermediate-good producing firms), a government and a monetary authority. It is exposed to stochastic and exogenous shocks to total factor productivity, oil export revenues and the growth rate of money. The most important features of the model, which distinguish it from most other proposed models for the economy of Iran, are the assumptions of the presence of monopolistic competition in intermediate-good producing firms and also a degree of... 

The procyclical behavior of public investment expenditure in OECs is one of the main channels through which the blessing of the natural resource abundance turns into a curse. The focal issue about the public investment expenditures in OECs is the misallocation and the inefficiency of these expenditures which often appear in the form of white elephants- i.e. government investment projects with large scale and high social/political prestige for the politicians implementing theme, but with negative economic return- especially in the oil booms. Moreover, the imprical evidence shows that the efficiency of public investment management in OECs is positively and significantly correlated with the... 

The constitution's effect on economy’s performance is a complex and interesting issue. In the labor market economy, The Employment protection legislation (EPL) beside the minimum wage are two important constitutions that considerably determine the main features of the market and affects the efficiency of the economy. The EPL’s strictness varies between different countries and as many argue, it is the main factor that describes the already difference between north American and southern Europe countries labor markets. In this research, the EPL’s influence on speed of adjustment in manufacturing sector of different countries was studied. To analyze the manufacturing sector, labor demand... 

This dissertation studies the intertemporal decisions on private consumption and its relationship with financial markets. The main focus here is on using micro-data and heterogeneities. The first chapter gives a brief review on the literature. In the second chapter, we present estimates of the Elasticity of Intertemporal Substitution (EIS) for Iranian households using synthetic cohort panels based on household micro-data. Results show significant difference with the common values used in Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models which are originally based on estimated values for developed countries. We show that this difference has important theoretical and practical implications.... 

In this study, we investigate the effect of the macroeconomic volatility on the income distribution of Iranian households from two descriptive and causal aspects. In the descriptive section, by using the national accounts and the data on urban household expenditures and income, from the years 1997 to 2018, the relationship between macroeconomic variables and household budget is extracted, and the "Income Distribution-Business Cycle" is portrayed. In the causal section, a two-step reduced form model with fixed effects is used to estimate the effect of GDP fluctuations on inequality and income distribution fluctuations of Iranian households. This is done using the panel data from the... 

In the Iranian economy, the unemployment rate has always been volatile and double-digit, and this has had a devastating effect on people's livelihoods and the welfare of society. Therefore, job creation has always been the main concern of policymakers. To increase employment, based on the Okun's law, the output must be increased. Since from an economic point of view, economic growth should be accompanied by employment growth and there should be a positive relationship between the employment growth rate and the country's economic growth rate. But in 1384 to 1398, the Iranian labor market has experienced a puzzling behavior in terms of the growth of the total number of employees and the growth... 

Our study investigates the real consequences of variations in the first and second moments of working capital requirement (WCR) in the presence of financial frictions. We introduce a theoretical link from imperfect information about WCR to firms’ performance. Firms choose non-prepaid factors of production with uncertainty about required prepayments, where their access to credit is constrained by collateral. After realization, firms with higher WCR may face financial constraints. This uncertainty influences their demand for inputs, albeit risk-neutrality. Unable to employ the projected level of prepaid input, constrained firms encounter capacity underutilization, leading to misallocation of... 

In this thesis the impact of inflation on urban household saving is investigated. For calculating sensitivity of saving respect to price changing of different groups of commodities, firstly we divided household cost to two separated groups of durable and nondurable and then by defining total income as summation of monetary and nonmonetary income of households, We consider saving as total income minuses nondurable consumption. Finally we estimated the “Extended Linear Expenditure System” model base on the prepared data. Since inflation is result of unequal changes in prices of goods and services, the approach of expenditure system allows us to assess unequal changes in prices for eight... 

The main question of this thesis is if and to what extent does the Social Security retirement benefits cause early retirement. This is important because the more individuals are willing to retire earlier, the larger are the Social Security liabilities to pay the retirement benefts, and also it means that more people are leaving the labor force, hence a lower labor force participation. The research was conducted on a sample of men extracted from the Social Security Or-ganization data sets, employing Option Value and Peak Value models to estiamte a binary choice model. The results indicate that Social Security (in the form of retirement benefits) have a significant effect on retirement ... 

This paper develops a theoretical model based on economic misconceptions to explain the stylized facts of unsatisfactory long-term economic growth rates. Should the economic agents lack sufficient public understanding of economics, office-seeking politicians can take advantage of the situation and adopt populistic policies to get elected into office. Undermined economic growth is the price society pays for its ignorance. This mechanism is most relevant in democratic resource-abundant countries suffering from weak institutions. That is because natural resource price fluctuations make it more challenging to distinguish politicians’ performance and exogenous economic shocks, translating...