The book shows that the implementation of a sustainable energy strategy in Iran provides the opportunity for further economic and social development. In this context, the aim of the book is to provide some of the analyses needed to rethink the country’s energy strategy and to grasp the...

The back-propagation neural network (BPN) model has been the most popular form of artificial neural network model used for forecasting, particularly in economics and finance. It is a static (feed-forward) model which has a learning process in both hidden and output layers. In this paper, we...

Artificial neural network modeling has recently attracted much attention as a new technique for estimation and forecasting in economics and finance. The chief advantages of this new approach are that such models can usually find a solution for very complex problems, and that they are free from...

Oil price shocks impact the global economy, but the effects are not alike across the countries. While higher oil prices are beneficial to oil-exporting countries, they are harmful to economic performance of oil-importing countries. The opposite is also true for the lower oil prices. Nonetheless,...

This study investigates the effects of an oil boom on firms' performance using data from the Canadian Annual Survey of Manufactures. We exploit the time variation of the booming natural resource sector activity in an oil-producing area with the location of manufacturing plants. We hypothesize...

Asymmetry has been well documented in the business cycle literature. The asymmetric business cycle suggests that major macroeconomic series, such as a country's unemployment rate, are non-linear and, therefore, the use of linear models to explain their behavior and forecast their future values...

Stock prices are one of the most volatile economic variables and forecasting stock prices and their returns has proved very challenging, if not impossible. In this paper, we apply a battery of linear and nonlinear models to forecast the returns in nine international stock exchanges for the...

Oil price shocks affect macroeconomic performance in both oil-importing and oil-exporting countries. The recent research on the oil-macroeconomy relationship in the oil-importing countries shows that oil price shocks have asymmetric effects on their economic growth; the adverse effects of higher...

Efficiency wages is one of the recent new Keynesian theoreis providing a micro foundation to explain real rigidities in the labour market and long run involuntary unemployment. There are many empirical studies on efficiency wages in developed economies, but there is not a well documented...