This paper examines the necessity of regulating the Iranian card payments system (SHAPARAK) based on the theory of two-sided markets. The expansion of the payment card system in recent years has arisen some questions regarding the role of all kinds of costs and expenses such as interchange fees, cardholder fees, merchant fees, and network externality in balancing the market. Since there is only...

The Shark Reef Marine Reserve in Fiji is an ecotourism project designed to protect a small reef patch and its fauna while preserving the livelihood of local communities. It involves the local communities by using a participatory business planning approach to Marine Protected Area management, generating income through diver user fees, distributed to the local villages that have exchanged their t...

Skilled investors make money off uninformed investors. By acting as intermediaries, they provide a hedge to the uninformed investors themselves. I present a model in which households have imperfect information about expected returns. Non-traded income shocks lead them to rebalance, sometimes at the wrong time. Active funds hedge this risk by trading on superior information. In equilibrium, they...

Abstract Stormwater utility fees provide dedicated revenues for managing stormwater. In setting fees, household-level affordability should be considered. Existing research does not address methods to evaluate the of stormwater especially alongside other household water costs. This paper aims fill that gap. We present a scenario-based approach in municipality, which considers essential service c...

Background Over the last decade, Ethiopia has made impressive national improvements in health outcomes, including reductions in maternal, neonatal, infant, and child mortality attributed in large part to their Health Extension Program (HEP). As this program continues to evolve and improve, understanding the unit cost of health extension worker (HEW) services is fundamental to planning for futur...

We find direct evidence that institutions churn stocks, increase commissions per share and pay unusually high commissions on trades in order to send abnormally high commissions to lead underwriters of upcoming IPOs. These excess commission payments are a particularly effective way for transient investors to receive lucrative IPO allocations. Our results suggest that the underwriter’s concern fo...

domestic tourism has an important role in socio-economic development in several ways including creating jobs and improving income distribution. although several researcheshave been done on tourism demand, a small proportion of them have been on domestic tourism. in this paper, the price and expenditure elasticities of the household demand for domestic tourism in iran, focusing on the case of ha...

The British government has signalled major increases in funding for higher education, particularly for top universities carrying out world-class research, but, as part of these funds are planned to come from so-called 'top-up' fees charged to students, there are concerns that more expensive practical subjects such as science may suffer a decline in student uptake. Top-up fees of up to £3,000 re...