Decisive factors in medical tourism destination choice: A case study of Isfahan,Iran and fertility treatments

The birth of the first in vitro fertilized baby, followed by further advances in the field of assisted reproductive technology (ART) has made this technology one of the most attractive tourism innovations among the different categories of medical tourism. In addition, factors such as legal, moral, religious and ethical issues play important roles in choosing reproductive tourism destinations. The aim of this study was to examine the factors influencing destination choice in infertile couples who referred to the Isfahan Fertility and Infertility Center in Isfahan, Iran. Field evaluation was carried out based on a documentary survey and questionnaire completed by interviewers. Among a target group of 80 infertile couples, 67 were interviewed. The majority of participants in this study were Muslim couples who traveled for reproductive tourism to Iran. It can be concluded that religious affinity may have paramount importance in reproductive medical tourism for Muslim infertile couples.     

Merton Model and Capital Measurement in Commercial Banks: A Case Study of Selected Emerging Countries in Southeast Asia

Following the implementation of Basel III criteria concerning the supervision of banks capital, this paper attempts to examine the competence of Merton-type probability of default as an indicator for measuring optimal capital in commercial banks of five Southeast Asian emerging economies. The estimated default risk changes are consistent with the changes in market value of banks’ asset in countries studied. Using a forward-looking approach, the banks required capital has been measured to reach a hypothetical level of probability of default as an accepted level by policy makers. Empirical results show that the banks had to increase their current capital in order to reduce the risk of bankruptcy in crisis times. The findings of this study refer evidently to the efficiency of Merton-type default risk to estimate the adequate capital and to use in micro and macro-prudential studies or stress tests on commercial banks.     

Institutional Ownership Type and Earnings Quality: Evidence from Iran

Institutional ownership is an important factor in corporate governance. Institutional investors play important roles in firms because of their substantial shareholdings and their capability to monitor managers. However, the question is whether they are capable of monitoring the managers. The literature has provided different evidence for the monitoring role of institutional investors. This study attempts to provide insights into the monitoring roles of institutional investors by examining the relationship between institutional ownership and earnings quality on the Tehran Stock Exchange. Institutional investors are classified into two groups, namely active institutional investors and passive institutional investors, based on their monitoring power in Iran. A multidimensional method is used to measure the various aspects of earnings quality, such as earnings response coefficient, predictive value of earnings, discretionary accruals, conservatism, and real earnings management. The results show that institutional ownership has a positive effect on earnings quality. Similar to total institutional ownership, active institutional ownership has positive effects on proxies of earnings quality. Nonetheless, passive institutional ownership does not have any power to affect earnings quality. Moreover, lead-lag tests of the direction of causality suggest that institutional ownership leads to more earnings quality and not the reverse.     

Empirics of currency crises: A duration analysis approach

This paper empirically analyzes the origins of currency crises for a group of OECD economies from 1970 through 1998. We apply duration analysis to examine how the probability of a currency crisis depends on the length of non‐crisis periods, contagion channels, and macroeconomic fundamentals. Our findings confirm the negative duration dependence of a currency crisis—the likelihood of speculative attack sharply increases at the beginning of non‐crisis periods and then declines over time until it abruptly rises again. The results also indicate the hazard of a crisis increase with high values of the volatility of unemployment rates, inflation rates, contagion factors—which mostly work through trade channels, unemployment rates, real effective exchange rate, trade openness, and size of economy. To address concerns regarding validity of the identified crisis episodes, we exploit crisis episodes that are identified by a more objective approach based on the extreme value theory. Our results are robust under various specifications including two different crisis event sets that are identified on monthly and quarterly basis.     

Political institutions and government spending behavior: theory and evidence from Iran

This study examines how the quality of political institutions affects the distribution of the government budget in Iran. We first introduce a mechanism through which democracy can shift government expenditure from national defense (military) to productivity-enhancing public spending (e.g., education). Using impulse response functions and a variance decomposition analysis on the basis of a vector autoregressive (VAR) model, our results imply that the response of military spending to an improvement (a deterioration) of democratic institutions is negative (positive) and statistically significant, whereas that of education spending is positive (negative) and significant. Our results are robust to other indicators of political institutions, different orderings of variables in the VAR, and alternative specifications of government spending categories.     

A Market Efficiency Comparison of Islamic and Non-Islamic Stock Indices

This article examines the martingale difference hypothesis (MDH) and the random walk hypothesis (RWH) for nine conventional and nine Islamic stock indices: Asia-Pacific, Canadian, Developed Country, Emerging, European, Global, Japanese, UK, and United States. It investigates whether Islamic stock indices are more, less, or as efficient as their conventional counterparts. We test four sub-periods of bullish and bearish stock markets, together with the financial meltdown and its recovery, over the period 1997–2012. We use the Escanciano and Lobato’s (2009) automatic portmanteau test (AQ) and Deo’s (2000) test for the MDH. We also apply the automatic variance ratio test (AVR) developed by Choi (1999) and Kim (2009) for the RWH. Over the period from 1997 to 2012, we find that three conventional indices (Europe, Japan, and UK) are efficient, but that none of the Islamic indices are efficient in these markets. During the recent financial crisis, our results indicate slightly more efficiency for the Islamic indices than their conventional counterparts. Our study finds that overall the conventional indices are more efficient than their Islamic counterparts. Nevertheless, during periods of general downturns the Islamic indices have shown the same level of efficiency as their counterparts. Furthermore, it appears that during the last two sub-periods under study, the Islamic indices have moved toward efficiency, displaying the same level of efficiency as their counterparts.     

The One.Tel Collapse: Lessons for Corporate Governance

One.Tel was a major corporate collapse in Australia in 2001. At the time of its collapse, it was the fourth largest telecommunications company in Australia with more than two million customers and operations in eight countries. Analyses of quantitative and qualitative data from diverse sources suggest that One.Tel's collapse is a classic case of failed expectations, strategic mistakes, wrong pricing policy, and unbridled growth. The company's meteoric rise and fall was associated with serious deficiencies in its corporate governance, including weaknesses in internal control, financial reporting, audit quality, board's scrutiny of management, management communication with the board, and poor executive pay‐to‐performance link. Thus, the collapse of One.Tel has several important lessons on the role of corporate governance in preventing corporate collapse.     

Product differentiation,market dynamics and the value relevance of trade payables: Evidence from UK listed firms

This paper provides a comprehensive evidence on how product and market dynamics affect the value relevance of trade payables. Using a sample of 2559 UK listed firms over the period 2005–2014, we find a positive relationship between trade payables and firm performance. Our evidence suggests that trade payables increase (decrease) performance in firms with differentiated products and demand uncertainty (larger market share). We demonstrate that the relative value relevance of bank credit versus suppliers’ credit is dependent on the nature of the product, the level of sales volatility, and market share. We use an innovative approach to assess the robustness of our results to omitted variable bias.     

Integrated multi-period cell formation and subcontracting production planning in dynamic cellular manufacturing systems

In this paper, an integrated mathematical model of the multi-period cell formation and production planning in a dynamic cellular manufacturing system (DCMS) is proposed with the aim of minimizing machine, inter/intra-cell movement, reconfiguration, partial subcontracting, and inventory carrying costs. This paper puts emphasis on the effect of the trade-off between production and outsourcing costs on the re-configuration of the cells in cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs) under a dynamic environment, in which the product mix is different from a period to another resulting in the operational dynamism in the cells. The proposed model is verified by a number of numerical examples and related sensitivity analysis.     

Government and managerial influence on auditor switching under partial privatization

We investigate how auditor switching is affected by government influence, misalignment between type of auditor (government vs. private) and type of controlling shareholder (government vs. private), and misalignment between an incumbent auditor and imputed preferences of managers in a market characterized by continued substantial government ownership in listed entities. We exploit a natural policy and regulatory experiment in Iran that allows us to investigate what happens when previously government-owned entities are partially privatized as listed entities where, in many cases, the government retains significant ownership interests. At the same time, there were significant changes in the audit market, resulting in large increases in the number of private sector auditors competing for previously state-administered audits. We find the likelihood of auditor switches is strongly associated with measures of misalignment between type of auditor and type of controlling shareholder and auditor–managerial misalignment, but these associations are constrained by significant government influence. Exposing the constraining effect of significant government influence on auditor switching is an important contribution to our understanding of privatizations, government shareholder influence and auditor choice. These results have implications for policy development in other emerging and transition economies where privatization remains largely partial, and competition among private sector auditors is still emergent.