Privatization means establishing a new system based on the market mechanisms and consequently making a change, alteration in different aspects of economy and is a process in which the government can examine the possibility of transferring the duties and facilities to the private sector on any level and if necessary, exerts such transfer. On the other hand, exports in industry sector can be a noticeable point for the economic growth of any country. Enhancing the exports of the steel industry of the country can have a principal role in the economic pursuit of the country’s non-oil products. Such an enhancement brings about a positive effect in the efficiency of the stocks within the financial markets by developing the steel industry. Researchers of this field claim that privatization in the steel industry results in the further development of the steel stock market and exports. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on factors influencing on privatization of the firms in steel industry. The study has designed a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributed it among some experts who worked for Mobarakeh steel producer in Iran. Using principle component analysis, the survey has concluded that export activities were influenced the most by six major factors including creativity, technological limitation, opportunities and challenges, being up to date, customer orientation and financial sanction. Moreover, firm performance was influenced by two major factors of stakeholder’s satisfaction and organizational culture. Finally, two factors of rationalism and market orientation influenced the most on privatization.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine whether or there is any difference between the returns of two value and growth portfolios, sorted by price-to-earnings (P/E) and price-to-book value (P/BV), in terms of the ratios of market sensitivity to index (β), firm size and market liquidity in listed firms in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) over the period 2001-2008. The selected firms were collected from those with existing two-consecutive positive P/E and P/BV ratios and by excluding financial and holding firms. There were five independent variables for the proposed study of this paper including P/E, P/B, market size, market sensitivity beta (β) and market liquidity. In each year, we first sort firms in non-decreasing order and setup four set of portfolios with equal firms. Therefore, the first portfolio with the lowest P/E ratio is called value portfolio and the last one with the highest P/E ratio is called growth portfolio. This process was repeated based on P/BV ratio to determine value and growth portfolios, accordingly. The study investigated the characteristics of two portfolios based on firm size, β and liquidity. The study has implemented t-student and Levin’s test to examine different hypotheses and the results have indicated mix effects of market sensitivity, firm size and market liquidity on returns of the firms in various periods.

There is a concern that auditors and the public may have different beliefs about the auditors’ responsibilities and the messages delivered by audit reports. During the past few years, some spectacular and well‐publicized corporates such as Anderson consulting collapse and the subsequent implication of the reporting auditors have emphasized on the audit expectation gap. It appears that public misperceptions represent a major reason for the legal liability crisis facing the accounting profession. The objective of this paper is to present an empirical investigation on the audit expectation gap for some privately hold firms in Iran. The population of this survey includes two groups of official auditing officials and management of some privately held firms. The results of the survey have indicated that there were some meaningful difference between management and audit group’s perceptions in terms of the auditors’ roles and responsibilities. However, there was no meaningful relationship between management and audit group’s perceptions in terms of the auditors’ independence.

Cash is the life blood of the organizations and cash management is the important aspect of any organization. Corporate cash management boosts the companies from small to giant in the competitive environment. In this study, we highlighted three factors of a good cash management practices; namely cash conversion cycle, cash holding and credit score. Influence of one factor to other help organizations manage their corporate cash more appropriately. In this study, we collected data from Capitaline corporate data base of Mumbai over the period 2002-2011. In this study we observed that due to higher credit score, companies were forced to minimize their cash conversion cycle and helped them maintain lower levels of working capital.

Consumer credit risk assessment involves the implementation of risk assessment techniques to manage a borrower’s account from the event of pre-screening a potential application through to the management of the account during its life-cycle and possible write-off. This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the relationship between 13 different factors such as credit history, applications’ educational and management skills, etc. and credit risk. The study selects the profiles of 380 applicants who received loans from one of Iranian banks named Bank Mellat in city of Tehran, Iran over the period 2010-2011. Using Pearson correlation, the study has determined a meaningful relationship between applicants’ profiles including credit history, business characteristics, personal characteristics, etc. and credit risk.

Capital structure is a controversial issue in the field of corporate finance. There are several studies to find a way to determine the optimal capital structure to minimize the cost of capital and maximize the corporate value. In fact, capital structure is a combination of firms’ liabilities and capital to meet long term assets. This paper investigates the role of the hierarchical theory in explaining the capital structure of the firms based on enterprise life cycle model on selected firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) using three methods of net equities, net liabilities and retained earnings. The study uses Park and Chen’s (2006) method [Park, Y., & Chen, K. H. (2006). The effect of accounting conservatism and life-cycle stages on firm valuation. Journal of Applied Business Research (JABR), 22(3), 75-92.] to categorize the life cycle of 81 randomly selected firms from TSE over the period 2007-2012. The results indicate that the hierarchical theory represents the growing firms better than the matured firms do. The results also show that firms were more willing to reduce their dividend per share for financing their projects.

Today Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) still remains as an attempt alone. For more than a decade, supply chain evolution to be a low carbon chain in an energy and resource constrained world has been posing greater challenges. Though environmental policies remain without much variation towards green operations in an industry, the implantation strategies and stages vary. There have been a number of studies by researchers and a lot of endeavors by organizations to build a green supply chain, mainly because of pressure from the professional bodies like EPA, WEEE, OECD, and Clean Air Act to reduce emissions with growing concerns over climate change issues, global warming, and requirements from policy makers, end users, stake holders and others. But, at the implementation level there lacked a proper framework on GSCM which suggests guidelines for proper planning and coordination, and the practices to be adopted. This indicates the need for a complete strategic approach on the part of decision makers across the supply chain to have sustainability as a corporate social responsibility. The research gap exists in a holistic perception with regard to a product when supply chain stages are mapped for sustainability due to diverse environmental issues. Also, to build a holistic approach, we must know how the stages and levels interact. Thus, in this work, a Parametric Matrix demarking various level and stages of a supply chain related to a product, in general, is developed from various literatures till date. Such a metric will be useful for the industries to identify the bottleneck areas in their supply chain towards sustainability. Hence, the desired and relevant level of factors to be considered at each stage to become green can easily be decided.

We know that Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC) is one of the measures of liquidity management. In this paper, we made an attempt to analyse the impact of CCC on the cash management. In this study we selected five companies from Pharmaceutical Sector, including, Alchemist, Lupin, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratory, Cipla and Ranbaxy. In this study, we used the secondary data for analysis and retrieved from Capitaline database for ten years period from 2002 to 2011. Through cash conversion cycle we can easily determine the working capital requirement. Because, it considers the time gap between expenditure for the purchases of raw materials and collection from sales of finished goods prepared with such raw materials, CCC plays an important role in firm’s short term assets and liabilities as well as success of the firm.

Providing insurance contract with “deductible” is beneficial for both insurer and insured. In this paper, we provide a utility modeling approach to handle insurance pricing and evaluate the tradeoff between discount benefit and deductible level. We analyze four different pricing problems of no insurance, full insurance coverage, insurance with β% deductible and insurance with D-dollar deductible based on a given utility function. A numerical example is also used to illustrate some interesting results.

Cash flow and leverage are two main components of any business firms. A good level of cash flow and leverage shows a desirable performance for business organizations. This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the relationship between combined leverage and cash flow in terms of board of director’s ownership and corporate governance structures. The study selects 86 randomly selected firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2009-2013. Using some statistical tests, the survey has indicated that there was a meaningful relationship between leverage and cash flow for firms with different corporate governance structures. The study has also determined that there was a meaningful relationship between leverage and cash flow for firms with different board of director’s ownerships.