The fifth development plan

The four development plans, under which Iran has gone forward on a continuous course of industrialization since 1949 were followed by a Fifth Development Plan, which came into force in March 1973. This fifth plan had however to be revised recently: the expenditure on investments is to be doubled compared with the original plan.     

Identifying contextual effective factors on total fertility rate decline in Iran: a qualitative framework-based study

This study was conducted to explain the contextual factors associated with total fertility rate (TFR) decline to help policymakers. A qualitative approach and Leichter contextual analysis framework were applied to conduct this study. The participants were selected using purposive sampling method, and also the interviews continued until data saturation was reached. Individuals with knowledge and perspectives on population policies were included in the study to improve the research credibility. The data validity was achieved by applying the maximum variety in selecting the sample. The results were classified into four groups, including situational, structural, cultural, and environmental factors. Situational factors included political sanctions, drought, and road accidents. Structural factors involved government policies, the absence of monitoring, paying no attention to the required conditions, housing status, employment status, economic status, and other issues. Cultural factors were classified into the seven categories, including divorce, socio-economic development, women's employment, marriage age, urbanization, and other issues and factors included international treaties, and the western influence. Policymakers and administrators in the field of demographic policies can make more accurate strategies to increase TFR by recognizing the causes that reduce fertility with the help of providing the possibility to understand better the factors affecting the TFR decline.

     

Who’s behind the wheel? The role of social and media news in driving the stock–bond correlation

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - This study investigates the impact of both social and news sentiments indices on the dynamic stock–bond correlation across wavelet-based...     

Testing the ‘Fear of Floating’ Hypothesis: A Statistical Analysis for Eight African Countries

Open Economies Review - This paper revisits the fear of floating hypotheses for eight African countries from the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in the early 1970s up until...     

BANKING SECTOR PERFORMANCE,PROFITABILITY, AND EFFICIENCY: A CITATION-BASED SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

This study presents a citation-based systematic literature review on banking sector performance, particularly in terms of profitability, productivity, and efficiency. Specifically, the study aims to identify the leading sources of knowledge in terms of the most influential journals, authors, and papers. The paper presents a content analysis of the 100 most cited papers. In total, 1996 peer-review papers were found relevant in the Scopus database by using a comprehensive list of keywords. The results show that the Journal of Banking & Finance appears to be the leading journal in terms of publication count and citations. Based on total citations, Allen Berger is the most prolific author. The most cited paper is “Problem loans and cost efficiency in commercial banks” by Allan Berger and Robert DeYoung. The content analysis of the top 100 papers identifies five essential themes: determinants of efficiency, methodology, ownership, financial crises, and scale economies. In terms of estimation approaches, 74% of papers employed frontier analysis, which includes 34% parametric and 40% nonparametric methods, and remaining 26% have used financial ratio analysis. Additionally, stochastic frontier and data envelopment analysis are widely used in parametric and nonparametric methods, respectively. An intermediate approach is extensively adopted for the specification of inputs and outputs.     

Cash management in the travel and leisure sector: evidence from the United Kingdom

This study investigates the determinants of cash holdings for companies operating in the travel and leisure (TL) sector of the United Kingdom (UK) between 2005 and 2016. The study finds that growth opportunities, cash flow, and cash flow volatility affect cash holdings positively, while size, leverage, liquidity, asset intangibility and dividend payments affect negatively. Companies operating in the airlines sub-sector hold more cash, while companies in the hotels and restaurants and bars sub-sectors hold less cash than the reference sub-sector of travel and tourism. Except for the free cash flow model, the trade-off and pecking order models of cash holdings are empirically supported for the TL sector.     

Fiscal stance,foreign capital inflows and the behavior of current account in the Asian countries

Empirical Economics - This paper investigates the causality relationship between budget and current account deficits for 14 Asian countries. The major findings based on bootstrap Granger causality...