Sharif Digital Repository

In Islam, a solar eclipse is considered a significant event and a sign of the power of Allah (God). During a solar eclipse, Muslims are encouraged to perform a specific prayer. In addition, it symbolizes and reminds believers of the Day of Judgment. The solar eclipse is an exogenous and predictable event with no daily life consequences. Therefore, the only channel that may affect religious spending is a spiritual reference to God. We find that a total solar eclipse within a past quarter significantly increases the likelihood of religious contributions by 2.44 percent, mainly driven by making vows and donating to holy shrines. It also increases the donation sizes and its share in total... 

In the present study, the effects of increasing the value of shale gas production, either due to increased production or price increases, have been studied on economic variables such as employment, wage, property value and the number of births. In this regard, the data for each of these variables was used at the county level in the United States of America between 2000 and 2011. In order to estimate the desired effects, counties are divided into two types of boom and non-boom counties. The findings indicate that increasing natural gas production will lead to more employment and wage growth in boom counties than non-boom counties. Also, during the period of increasing production, the value of... 

Co-movement between inflation and nominal interest in response to an interest rate shock, dubbed neo-fisherianism, has been the subject of contentious debate since the advent of non-inflationary ZLB environment. We design an economic model rich with banking features to understand the economic responses to permanent and long-term interest rate shocks. We find that responses to a permanent positive interest rate shock depend on the monetary authorities’ speculation of the new long-term inflation rate, with the most probable outcome being a permanent increase in inflation. Responses to a long-term positive interest rate shock depict an increase and then decrease in inflation. We also discover... 

Assuring households’ access to essential goods at economy’s hard times has always been of policymakers’ main concerns. Using Household’s Income and Expenditure Survey data during Iran-Iraq war during 80’s, we have calculated welfare and distribution effects of rationing by coupons of three essential goods in these years. We found that rationed quantities were inefficiently excessive and due to their significant low prices, they were overconsumed. Also, without any extra financial burden, government could have improved lowest income quantile’s aggregate utility by 5.2% or 5.6%, if cash subsidy equal to each household’s previous subsidy value or an equal per-capita subsidy were distributed... 

Daily price limits are boundaries that regulators impose to control daily volatility in stock market. This paper studies the impact of an imposing price limit in Tehran Stock Exchange. To this end we use all the data about companies which were accepted in stock exchange and fara-stock exchange in 1392.In this year the price limit imposed on companies in stock exchange and fara-stock exchange are 4 and 5 percent respectively. Therefore, to estimate the effect of price limit we use the propensity score matching method and inverse probability weighting.The results indicate no significant differences between returns and trade volume between 4% and 5% price limits, but a significant difference... 

This study investigates the price elasticity of gasoline smuggling demand in Iran. For this purpose, a panel data of monthly gasoline consumption has been used that contains data for 160 regions of distribution for Iran's Oil Production Company between 2005 and 2014. The results of estimating the monthly elasticity of gasoline smuggling demand in each region show a significant impact of the gasoline price differential between Iran and its neighboring countries, as well as the distance of each region with the neighboring countries on the demand. The results of this study show that whenever gasoline prices increase inside the country, the inclination to smuggling has been decreased due to a... 

Iran has one of the lowest rates of female participation in the labor market among countries. In 2015, for every 100 men over 10 years old, only 21 women’s labor force participation was confirmed. This paper attemps to determine factors which cause low participation rate of women, particularly married ones. For this purpose, using structural estimation method, a dynamic discrete choice model was built, and estimated with means of simulated method of moments (SSM). The results indicated that the most important factor for low participation rate of married woman is children cost. Elimination of this cost would increase participation rate of married women about 30 percantage points  

The goal of this research is to obtain optimal toll for saveh-salafchegan, Tehran-pardis and Ghazvin-karaj highways. To obtain optimal toll, Small and Yan value pricing model was extended and then parametrs of the model was estimated by using daily data of Maintenance and road transport Organization, then value of time parameter was structurally estimated and optimall toll was numerically obtained for the highways. Finally sensitivity analysis was performed for all parameters. Results show that optimall toll for saveh-salafchegan highway is unique and respectively, are in interval τ≤0.03 and τ≤3.72 . Magnitude of value of time of road users and difference between value of time of users... 

This research is aimed at analyzing the effects of forming relationships between oil and gas companies and drilling rigs owned by drilling companies. For this purpose, panel data on 13240 contracts signed between 2000-2010 worldwide are used through employing a model with fixed effects and an instrumental variable for day-rate. Results show that repeated interaction between oil and gas companies and drilling rigs, does on one hand increase the number of contracted projects in future contracts, and on the other hand, improves their drilling performance. Moreover, it is seen that such effects are only captured by the first few interactions, and that they subside and vanish after the firms have... 

The paper aims to investigate the importance of firms’ financial constraints for pricing equity in Iran. We study the impact of financial constraints of non-financial firms on their stock returns using a sample of 241 manufacturing firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) for the period of 2007 to 2014. We use a similar index as in Kaplan and Zingales (1997), KZ, to measure financial constraint. We examine whether financial constraint influences stock returns and can improve the explanatory power of the Fama and French three-factor asset pricing model. Our findings indicate that financial constraints can be considered as an important factor affecting asset returns. Cross-sectional... 

In spite of developments in microwave mixers, reducing its noise figure is still a designers’ challenge in receiver applications. Due to generating intermodulations and saturating the following stages, the low noise amplifier cannot have a so much gain to decrease the noise of the following stages in a typical receiver. This problem is intensified in special applications because of low dynamic range of low noise amplifiers. Accordingly, the low noise amplifier is replaced sometimes by the mixer. Therefore, the design of a low noise mixer is an important issue in improving the noise performance of a total receiver.To this end, it is required to accurately analyse the nonlinear and noise... 

On May 5, 2014, Iran began the Health Transformation Plan in public hospitals to promote vaginal delivery by increasing physician fees and by freeing payment of natural labor. About five month later part of the plan extended to non-public hospitals, and the fee of vaginal delivery increased there as well. These consequent exogenous policies provide an ideal environment to examine how Ob/Gyn physicians and pregnant mothers respond to financial incentives using difference-in-difference identification. We find that after the first reform caesarean rates declined by 4.92 percent in public hospitals without any health deterioration, a significant but modest drop. Our results suggest that in the... 

The case for boosting the share of children benefiting from early childhood development (ECD) programs is strong, but expenditure has to be well-aimed. Not every program adopted under the name of ECD will provide the positive impacts that currently anchor ECD discussions among policy makers. In this report, we present results from an experimental evaluation of Cash Grant for Child Care program implemented in Sistan & Baluchestan province of Iran as a government subsidized ECD. The program provides monthly grants to ECD centers, as well as in-kind food quota per every child attending the center. At the end of school year, we did not find any significant differences in cognitive and... 

Gasoline consumption resulting from vehicular traffic is one of the most significant factors influencing the emission levels of pollutants. Since the sold gasoline at fuel stations does not necessarily translate into vehicular traffic, tracing the final consumer becomes challenging. hence, estimating the impact of gasoline consumption on air pollution is accompanied by biased results. Moreover, the COVID-19 outbreak, acting as an exogenous shock, has provided an opportunity to use data such as COVID-19 and intercity travel as instrumental variables, gasoline consumption, and emission levels, between 2018 and 2020, show unbiased estimates of the effect of gasoline consumption on air... 

In this work, the dynamic competition between firms providing internet services is studied. The framework is Markov equilibrium whereby structural parameters are obtained using two-step estimations, allowing for analyzing the situation in case of subsidies for service upgrade. The results show that such subsidy has little effect on the number of firms while increasing the number of fast firms  

Estimating the price elasticity of gas demand involves complexities depending on the gas market structure and pricing mechanisms in different countries. Distinguishing between supply and demand shocks and block pricing are among the main challenges that can cause endogeneity in elasticity estimates. Iran's domestic gas network, one of the largest and most extensive household gas markets, is divided into five climatic zones based on weather conditions. The pricing steps for these five climates during the five cold months are such that a customer in a warmer climate pays higher prices. Conversely, the pricing steps for the seven warm months are the same for all climates. This policy creates a... 

The correlation between religious adherence and voter turnout is widely studied. However, whether the relation is causal is an open question. We use Household Expenditures and Income Survey (HEIS) data in Iran, which encompasses nine distinct religious expenditures. These expenditures have low correlation with each other and represent different aspects of religious adherence. We use Imamzadeh (some historical holy shrines) as Instruments to estimate the causal effect of religious expenditures on voter turnout. The results reveal that religious expenditures influence both presidential and parliamentary voter turnout, with a notably stronger impact on presidential elections  

Based on fog computing paradigm, new applications have become feasible through the use of hardware capabilities of smart phones. Many of these applications require a vast amount of computing and real-time execution should be guaranteed. Based on fog computing, in order to solve these problems in is necessary to offload heavy computing to servers with adequate hardware capabilities. On the other side, the offloading process causes time overhead and endangers the real-timeliness of the application. Also, because of the limited battery capacity of the handheld devices, energy consumption is very important and should be minimized.The usual proposed solution for this problem is to refactor the... 

Investors highly value the ability to predict the behavior of the capital market. Over time, various methods have been introduced to forecast the future of this market and anticipate its movements. A novel approach to achieving this is by developing data-driven decision support systems that can assist investors in making informed trading decisions. The opinions of experts play a crucial role in shaping people's perception of the market, which ultimately affects its final behavior. In this study, we have created a decision support system that can help investors by considering the complexities and meaningful relationships between different aspects of the problem. We have developed frameworks... 

Price limits are boundaries established by market regulators to confine daily movements of security prices within a predetermined price range. In this study, we have used the data of trades of all companies listed in the Tehran Stock Exchange during the years 1385-1393 to study the characteristics of stocks that hit price limits repeatedly using a panel regression model with fixed effects and the generalized method of moments (GMM). In fact, this study aims at investigating the price limits in Tehran Stock Exchange by a novel and distinct approach. In general, risky stocks exhibit more price volatility and thus are more likely to experience price-limit hits. In summary, the results reveal...