This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of two macroeconomic factors; namely exchange rate and liquidity on stock index. The proposed study was applied in Iran and on major index of Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2001-2011. They reported that the currency exchange maintained negative impact on stock exchange for the period of investigation. This is due to the fact that when currency devalued, working capital decreases and firms did not enough money to purchase raw materials, pay wages, etc. In addition, liquidity marinated a direct and positive relationship with exchange index. However, the impact of liquidity seems to be bigger than currency exchange.

Measuring the performance of governmental organizations plays essential role on making strategic decisions. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to measure the performance of 22 different branches of municipalities in city of Tehran, Iran. The proposed study uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) for measuring the relative efficiencies of various units. The proposed DEA uses fixed assets, employee expenses and total income as input and Green Space Development, Resumption and Waste, Development of Cultural Spaces as well as Improvement of Passages and highways are considered as the output of the model. The results indicate that 9 regions were operating efficiently and 14 regions were inefficient.

There are many evidences to believe that investors’ personal characteristics influence on their financial decisions when they purchase stocks, bounds, etc. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to study the effects of 20 personal characteristics on 52 managers of mutual funds in Iran. Using Pearson correlation test, the study has detected that seven factors including anchoring & adjustment, framing, over confidence, illusion of control, hindsight, recency and self-attribution positively influence on investors’ behaviors. In addition, five factors including consistency, self-control, loss aversion, regret aversion and availability negatively influence on investors’ behaviors. However, the study did not find any evidence to confirm any kind of relationship of representativeness, conservatism, ambiguity aversion, optimism, mental accounting, confirmation and status quo on investors’ behaviors.

Measuring the relative efficiency of banking industry has been one of the most interesting areas of research for the past few years. There are literally various techniques for measuring the relative performance of similar units such as banks including data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis. This paper presents an empirical investigation to measure the relative performance of some Iranian banks located in province of Alborz, Iran for two consecutive fiscal years of 2009 and 2010. The proposed study implements stochastic frontier analysis to measure the performance of these banks based on two set of criteria. In the first model, total loans devoted are considered as output and employees, total customers?investment, total fixed assets as well as no-interest deposits are considered as inputs of the model. For the second model, special banks?characteristics such as total economic value of branch, the ratio of fixed assets to total assets, educational backgrounds of employees as well as the level of automation in the system are considered as input parameters of the systems. The results indicate that most bank perform relatively well according to their efficiencies.

Total quality management (TQM) plays an important role on improving educational systems. In this paper, we present an empirical study to investigate the effect of TQM components on customer satisfaction in one of higher educational organizations in South East part of Iran called Qeshm. The proposed study investigates the effects of five TQM components including tangible, attitude, reliability, content and mode of delivery on customer satisfaction. The study designs a questionnaire consists of 37 questions and distributes it among a sample of university students and professors. Cronbach are calculated for significance, attitude, reliability, content and mode of delivery were 0.84, 0.83, 0.91, 0.90 and 0.83, respectively. The results of our survey are investigated using Pearson correlation ratios as well as regression analysis and the results indicate that all five components influence customer satisfaction, significantly.

Outsourcing plays an important role on reducing unnecessary activities in any organization and helps focus only on value added activities. Water resource organization in each city is responsible to supply fresh and clean water and dispose switch as efficiently as possible and all citizens normally benefit from these organizations. The proposed model of this paper uses DEMATEL to prioritize 14 different factors influencing on outsourcing activities. The survey was performed from October, 2011 to May, 2012 among employees on work for water resource organization in city of Semnan, Iran. The survey chooses a sample of 92 employees out of 120 people who worked for this organization. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 90%, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The results of the survey indicate that expediting work process is the most important factor while reducing the cost is considered as the least important factors among 14 different items.

Performance measurement plays an essential role on management of governmental agencies especially when profitability is not the primary concern and we need to consider other important factors than profitability such as customer satisfaction, etc. In this paper, we propose a multi-criteria decision making method to rank different national Iranian oil refining and distribution companies. The proposed study of this paper uses six factors including per capita supply, energy cost, physical productivity of labor, staff participation, quality control inspection of stations and education per capita. The proposed study uses Entropy to find the relative importance of each criterion and TOPSIS to rank 37 alternatives based on cities and three regions. The results of the implementation of our method indicate that central regions close to capital city of the country maintains the highest ranking (0.9122) while southern regions maintains the lowest comes in the lowest priority (0.0569) and the northern region is in the middle (0.7635).

Entrepreneurship development is a complex process, which plays long-term and pervasive role in the economical development of the countries. In order to become aware of the level of entrepreneurship, many countries are interested in making comparison between their own experiences and policies and those of others which have been successful in developing entrepreneurship. This study aims at making a comparative investigation of entrepreneurship in Iran and countries of global entrepreneurship monitor. Structural equation modeling was used to study the effect of independent variables of entrepreneurial activities and entrepreneurial perceptions between 2008 until 2010. The results show that entrepreneurial perceptions have a significant effect on entrepreneurial activities and observed variables have a complete positive relationship with each other.

Measuring technical efficiency of different industries plays an important role on making managerial decisions. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure technical efficiencies of various industries based on two-digit ISIC classification method in Iran. The proposed model uses stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and implements maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to estimate the parameters. The proposed study gathers the necessary data from year 2001 to year 2008 and implemented two methods where the second method is an extended model by using energy as part of efficiency estimation. The results of the survey indicate that auto industry was the most productive sector followed by equipments and the paper industry was among inefficient sectors.

Performance measurement plays an essential role on accelerating the efficiency of any organization. There are literally different methods for measuring the relative performance of a particular unit and many of them are involved considering various criteria. In this paper, we propose 360° feedback system for performance measurement of all employees who work for municipality of the city of Tabas located in east part of Iran. The proposed model of this paper also uses hierarchical method to cluster different attributes based on various characteristics and implements analytical hierarchy process to find the relative importance of all items. The survey uses five personal characteristics including cognitive, technical, personal and human skills and for each major item, the proposed model considers various sub-criteria. The results indicate that technical and cognitive skills are the most important personal characteristics followed by human and personal characteristics. The results of this survey show that responsibility and quality of work are the most important employee characteristics.