this paper aims at comparing tax effort in iran with that of 14 developing countries including jordan, algeria, malaysia, congo, nicaragua, india, sri lanka, paraguay, tunisia, peru, venezuela, philippine, and south africa. a tax ratio model is developed for this purpose. seemingly unrelated regression (sur) method and panel data for 1994-2002 periods are utilized to estimate the model. the res...

In this paper we discuss the calibration issues of regime switching models built on mean-reverting and local volatility processes combined with two Markov regime switching processes. In fact, the volatility structure of this model depends on a first exogenous Markov chain whereas the drift structure depends on a conditional Markov chain with respect to the first one. The structure is also assum...

Building on the current understanding of neural architecture of the visual cortex, we present a graphical model for learning and classification of motion patterns in videos. The model is composed of an arbitrary amount of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) with shared Gaussian mixture models. The novel extension of our model is the use of additional Markov chain, serving as a switch for indicating the...

The current OASI program redistributes resource from high wage workers to low wage workers and from two-earner couples to one-earner couples. Due to computational difficulty, however, most previous literature on the dynamic general equilibrium analyses of Social Security assumes “unisex” individuals and does not consider the redistribution between one-earner and two-earner households. In the pr...

This paper studies the growth and performance of foreign investment enterprises in developing countries in the context of global economic integration and domestic reform with a focus on Vietnam as a case study. A model of enterprise performance is constructed to provide empirical findings and evidence-based policy implications on the role of capital, investment, monetary and development pol...

Although gold is no longer a central cornerstone of the international monetary and financial system, it still attracts considerable attention from researchers and investors. Nowadays, many investors manage their risk with valuable assets such as gold. This paper examines the dynamic relationships between gold and stock markets in the Tehran Stock Exchange. We have applied the Markov switching m...

This paper investigates empirically the relationship between the pattern of fiscal policy and the demand for international reserves in developing countries, and how this relationship is associated with political risk and conditional access to global capital markets. It finds evidence that for developing countries with low political risk, countercyclical (procyclical) fiscal policies are associa...

Exploiting three Italian earthquakes as quasi-experiments, we analyze the response of homeowners’ consumption to transfers targeted to finance housing reconstruction over time—which, like loans, mainly affect the liquidity of households’ wealth in the short run. We show that transfers that have no effect on consumption over a multi-year horizon, can have significant heterogeneous effects on imp...

The equity premium puzzle shows that using standard parameters and setup, the Consumption-based Capital Asset Pricing Model’s (CCAPM’s) prediction of the premium associated with systematic risk is out by an order of magnitude. The object of this paper is to consider the implications of each of the broad classes of explanations of the equity premium puzzle for resource allocation, welfare and po...

We analyze how public debt evolves when successive policymakers have different policy goals and cannot make credible commitments about their future policies. We consider several cases to be able to quantify the effects of imperfect commitment, political disagreement and political turnover. Imperfect commitment drives the long-run level of debt to zero. With political disagreement debt is a size...