taymour mohammadi

It seems necessary to regulate prices of public utilities such as water due to market failures, regardless of ownership. Based on available theoretical and experimental literature, The latest achievement of researchers in field of public utility regulation such as water, electricity, performance-based regulation in general, and performance-based price regulation in particular. Adjusting price of urban drinking water in provinces of country based on efficiency and performance of water distribution companies, while motivating Iranian water and sewage companies to improve efficiency and productivity, will also reduce water prices for consumers as a result of competition. In the study, several different stochastic frontier methods were considered to estimate a translog cost frontier function for the sample of Iranian water distribution companies over the 2012-2017 period. The inefficiency scores obtained from different methods are not found to be robust in their levels and rankings of companies. A possible explanation for this lack of robustness can be found in different ability of stochastic frontier methods to account for unobservable heterogeneity. From methodological point of view, The empirical results show that conventional random-effects models tend to overestimate cost inefficiency since the inefficiency estimates also contain unobserved heterogeneity. The true fixed effects model proposed by Greene seems to be able to distinguish between unobserved heterogeneity and inefficiency but it may underestimate inefficiency since all time-invariant effects are treated as unobserved heterogeneity. Therefore, this model seems to contribute, at least partially, to the solution of the problem of time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity in the estimation of cost inefficiency.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of trade facilitation on bilateral trade in developing countries. Trade facilitation increases the attractiveness of investing in countries by improving the flow of trade by speeding up the process of declaration and clearance of goods, and helps reduce the cost of trade and improve competitiveness. In order to quantify the impact of trade facilitation on bilateral trade, we have used the cross-border trade index of countries. Our data includes a sample of panel data of 21749 bilateral relations between developing countries for time span of years 2006 to 2018, which is used to estimate the impact of trade facilitation along with other important variables such as GDP, population, common border, common language and distance between countries using a weighted least squares method.Our results show that trade facilitation, if implemented by both countries, has positive effects on bilateral trade of industrial goods. The results also showed that the tendency for bilateral trade is higher among developing countries with countries with higher GDP. The results showed that having a common border is more important than a common language in bilateral trade, and on the other hand, trade between countries with a higher geographical distance is less. Therefore, it can be said that trade policy focusing on neighboring countries has a higher priority than farther developing countries.

The effects of International financial integration on the fluctuations of variables in response to shocks are a matter of heavily concentrated literature of the business cycle in recent years. In this paper, a New Keynesian DSGE model is developed in which there is a channel for capital account changes through the foreign deposit's inflow and outflow. Then the effects of financial integration are simulated. The integration factor is defined by the percentage of the total foreign deposits absorbed by the banking system. This coefficient could change due to changes in effective domestic interest rate and global interest rate. This paper shows in presence of oil shocks, the fluctuation of production, consumption, real exchange rate and variables of the banking system such as deposits and loans, is higher in financial integration but there is no significant difference in inflation. In presence of technology shocks, there is no significant difference.

Oil price wild fluctuations impact the economies of developing countries as well as those of developed ones. Focusing on OPEC’s political risks as a proxy of precautionary demand, this study aims to disentangle oil price factors using an SVAR approach for 1994Q1 to 2016Q4. We disentangled oil price shocks into political risks, supplies, global demand for industrial goods and other oil price shocks. Our results highlight that shocks originated from different sources affect oil prices differently in terms of both their lifetime and directions. Besides, it is revealed that the structure of oil market has changed due to the 2008 financial crisis, increased oil price fluctuations, changes in OPEC’s behaviour and accordingly its market power, and the advent of new shale oil technologies, thus affecting oil price sensitivities. Therefore, we found out that OPEC’s political risks affected oil markets way more significantly in 2008-2016.

International financial integration is a process of reducing financial frictions that lead to formation of free capital flows. Joining the international financial flow influences the volatility of economic variables from different channels and hence, it is important to examine the conditions that key variables are less responsive to shocks despite the capital account transfers. One of the issues that is being considered in this regard is the choice of the currency regime. Hence, in this paper, in assistance with a general dynamic stochastic equilibrium model with price rigidity, at first, a channel was designed to simulate the financial integration scenario in line with the characteristics of the Iranian economy and then the model performance in two modes of floating and managed float exchange rate regime in response to government spending and oil shocks has been investigated. The results show that, in response to government spending shocks, the floating exchange rate will lead to less fluctuations in key variables such as production, consumption, inflation and real exchange rate and in response to the oil shocks, managed float exchange rate will lead to less fluctuations in production, consumption, inflation and real exchange rate.

In this paper we use dynamic panel data methodology to estimate income and price elasticities of demand for gas in the four Iranian climatic regions as delineated by the National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC). Our results indicate a Cobb-Douglas production function where the sum of coefficients is higher than one, indicating monopolistic behavior by NIGC. We calculate the total cost of gas treatment and transmission using factors obtained from the Cobb-Douglas function. The study then proceeds to develop a Boiteux–Ramsey pricing model. Our estimated prices ndicate that the increase in gas prices observed up to 2014 are consistent with optinal Boiteux–Ramsey prices that produce an internal rate of return in the range of 17% to 25%. We note than any increase beyond this range would lead to welfare losses for natural gas consumers.

One of the most important issues in economics is to explain the considerable differences among nations in context of economic growth and well-being. In the recent decades، a consensus among economists suggests that institutions are the main reason for mentioned differences. If this is the case، immediately a question arises: which institutions are of the most importance in the growth and development process? So far، various classifications of institutions discuss on roles of them on economic performance. Rodrik (2005) classify institutions into four various categories; market creating institutions، market regulating institutions، market stabilizing institutions، and market legitimizing institutions. In this paper، we estimate the effect of these institutions on development by using dynamic GMM panel data method for the periods 1980-2009 and 1995-2009. The results suggest that market creating institutions and market stabilizing institutions are affecting per capita GDP، but the other institutions have no significant impact on global economic growth.