مطالب

The soundness and efficiency of banks is one of the important subjects that neglecting it can have adverse consequences for every country's economy. For economies depending on the money market, such as the Iran economy, this subject is more critical. Therefore, in this study, using panel data related to 16 Iranian banks for the annual period of 2010-2017, the economic efficiency was determined using a translog cost function and stochastic frontier analysis method then, by estimating the model of panel vector autoregression model and Granger causality test, the causal relationships between efficiency and information asymmetry in terms of adverse selection ( the ratio of loans to assets and the ratio of loans to deposits) and moral hazard ( the ratio of non-performing loans), were investigated, both of which are caused due to the information asymmetry. The estimations confirm the unilateral causal relationship of adverse selection and moral hazard with banking system efficiency. And, on the contrary, they claim that low efficiency of the banking system increases the adverse selection and moral hazard is not confirmed. Besides, the results of other estimates based on the panel model with random effects indicate a negative and significant impact of moral hazard and adverse selection on efficiency.

Businesses are increasingly interested in how big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics can be used to increase revenue, lower costs, and improve their business processes. In this paper, we describe how we have developed a data-driven machine learning method to optimize the collection process for a debt collection agency. Precisely speaking, we create a framework for the data-driven scheduling of outbound calls made by debt collectors. These phone calls are used to persuade debtors to settle their debt, or to negotiate payment arrangements in case debtors are willing, but unable to repay. We determine daily which debtors should be called to maximize the amount of delinquent debt recovered in the long term, under the constraint that only a limited number of phone calls can be made each day. Our approach is to formulate a Markov decision process and, given its intractability, approximate the value function based on historical data through the use of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. Precisely, we predict the likelihood with which a debtor in a particular state is going to settle its debt and use this as a proxy for the value function. Based on this value function approximation, we compute for each debtor the marginal value of making a call. This leads to a particularly straightforward optimization procedure, namely, we prioritize the debtors that have the highest marginal value per phone call. We believe that our optimized policy substantially outperforms the current scheduling policy that has been used in business practice for many years. Most importantly, our policy collects more debt in less time, whilst using substantially fewer resources leading to a large increase in the amount of debt collected per phone call.

The 2008 Great Financial Crisis increased the fluctuations in the stock market in the US and other countries that were linked together through various channels. In this regard, derivative instruments, as one of the main elements of the world's financial markets, had an essential role in reducing the stock market fluctuations and contagion of the crisis. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the negative effect of the derivative instruments on the contagion of stock markets in developing countries, including Brazil, India, China, and Russia, using monthly stock and futures indices over the 2007:01 to 2018:08. By considering the United States of America as the source of the crisis, the hypothesis was tested with the Copula function and Kendall's tau (rank correlation coefficient). The results have confirmed the hypothesis. According to the findings, we suggest that the economy moving towards openness should develop the derivative instruments to minimize the fluctuations as well as reduce the devastating effects of crisis contagion. Also, by upgrading the information of the investors and speculators, it can decrease the depth and intensity of the fluctuations that originated from international crises.

This study aimed to investigate the role of financial and non-financial determinants of the sustainability of Iranian banks. Accordingly, the sustainability score of 27 public and private Iranian banks were evaluated in 2017 by employing a sustainability model. The model was developed by the acquisition of sustainability codes, themes, and categories in the banking industry through Meta Synthesis, while its casual structure was determined by a combined method of Interpretive Structural Modeling and Analytical Network Process. Subsequently, we calculated the sustainability scores by using our proposed model to analyze the content of the banks’ disclosed information. Then, the effect of capital adequacy, total assets, financial leverage, loan to deposit ratio, return on assets and number of branches were investigated using multiple regressions on the banks' sustainability scores. Findings depict that total assets have a positive and significant relationship and capital adequacy has a negative and significant relationship with a bank's sustainability. Therefore, banks with more assets are more willing to participate in sustainability activities, due to more appropriate financial resources, as well as to support the bank's brand and its reputation to stakeholders. On the other hand, due to the wrong belief that sustainability is costly, and non-value adding for the banks, they get less involved in order to increase their capital adequacy ratio.

In this study, the effect of socioeconomic variables on provincial bread demand using the QUAIDS model has been investigated. In this model, socioeconomic variables such as age, gender and marital status of the head of household, the education level of the head of household and spouse’s head of household, household size, and occupation status of the head household have been used. The virtual variable of the target law of subsidies is also used to study the effects of this policy. To this end, the quadratic almost ideal demand system was applied. This model has been estimated using the consolidated data and Iterated Linear Least Squares Estimator and the information of more than 165,000 urban households in Iran for the years 1386-1394 and for different provinces. The results of the research show that during the studied years, bread is an essential good for all provinces except in Isfahan, Chaharmahal o Bakhtyari, and Kohgilouye. The compensated and uncompensated price elasticities of bread for all provinces are negative and less than one, so the bread is an inelastic good for all provinces. Also, the coefficients related to household size, gender, and marital status of the head of household and the target law of subsidies are positive and significant.

The primary purpose of this research is to develop and present dimensions and components of information transparency in banks to evaluate and rank the level of information disclosure and transparency of Iranian banks, considering the environmental and native conditions of Iran. Regarding the reporting conditions and reporting environment of Iranian banks and the information needs that govern them, one can evaluate the banks on an applied level by explaining the level of disclosure and specific information transparency and then ranked it. For this purpose, firstly, the list of dimensions and components of disclosure and transparency is extracted from research, documents, and standards issued by professional banking authorities. Then after incorporation, adjustment, and summary, the final list of dimensions and components is reviewed by experts. Due to the lack of a proper model of information disclosure and transparency in Iranian banks, the best way to confirm the criteria, dimensions, and components of the model was to use the opinions of experts. The Delphi method and the one-sample t-test were used to verify the components and finally design the model. As a result, the final model consists of 11 dimensions of information transparency to evaluate and rank the level of disclosure and transparency of Iranian banks and assess the degree of compliance of the current status of disclosure and transparency of Iranian banks with the proposed model using (SEM) and the t-sample.

Iran's banking industry has faced a wide range of changes during recent years and its banks' performance has been affected by these changes. On the one hand, the entry of private banks to the industry has made various changes in the industry's concentration and the market share of banks, on the other hand, banking technologies and strengthened competitive environment have led banks to increase efficiency and improve their performance. Given the importance of competition and efficiency in different components of the economy, the present study aims to investigate the competitiveness of private banks over the period 2005 to 2017. For this purpose, according to Panzar-Rosse model in the framework of panel data models, required data are collected from all private banks, then the competitiveness of private banks is calculated using the Panzar-Rosse model. According to the results, markets of Iran’s private banks are involved in monopolistic competition during the underlying time period.