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There are many factors affecting economic growth. Based on the literature, the effects of these factors such as higher education are mainly examined using endogenous economic growth theories. Various theoretical models are used to estimate the relation among variables affecting economic growth. This paper investigates the effects of higher education human capital on the economic growth in Iran using the endogenous growth models. The specified model includes human capital, physical investment and foreign debt which are identified as the main determinants of economic growth in Iran. Two dummy variables are included in the model in order to represent the effects of Islamic revolution and imposed war. The Johnson five steps approach is employed to estimate the empirical model. The results confirm that higher education human capital has a relatively large and statistically significant effect on the economic growth in Iran. It is found that the growth elasticity of higher education human capital is larger than the growth impact of physical capital investment. So, in order to obtain a high rate of economic growth in the country, investment in higher education human capital must be increased. Moreover, based on the findings, it is recommended that the investment should be made using domestic saving instead of financing abroad.

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The aim of this study is to examine the main determinants of visitors' willingness to Pay (WTP) for the Pasargad Historical Palaces using contingent valuation method (CVM). To this end, the data are collected using questionnaire throughout a random sample of the citizens of Isfahan, Shiraz and Marvdasht. The data include socio-economic information and visitors' willingness to pay. The variables considered in the WTP model comprise gender, age, education, occupation, income, household size, environmental attitude and distance. Considering the characteristics of the data, the Probit and Tobit techniques are employed to estimate the model. The empirical results indicate that the average visitors’ willingness to pay is 114530 Rials. Moreover, the results confirm that the gender, household size, distance and income have statistically significant effects on visitors’ willingness to pay. However, the results show that the women are more likely to pay more than men. Based on the individuals willingness to pay and the number of visitors, the value of Pasargad Palaces from the point of view of the domestic visitors and consumption surplus exceed to 6640 and 6060 million Rials, respectively.

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The purpose of this study is to introduce an index for calculating transaction costs in Iran over the 1984-2006 period. In order to calculate the transaction costs, Fuzzy Logic Approach is employed using MATLAB software. Based on the literature review, the determinants of the transaction costs are identified. They mainly comprise the standard deviation of the inflation rate, economic freedom, cash ratio and the ratio of public costs to GDP. Three scenarios are considered to calculate the transaction costs. Overall, the result shows that there is a cyclical trend in the transaction costs over the period considered in this study. The transaction costs decreased after the period of war - 1372-1374 - in all three scenarios considered. Following this period, however, the transaction costs has an upward trend and continued to increase until 1381 in all scenarios. After this increasing trend, the transaction costs have again decreased in the three scenarios.

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     The Armey curve demonstrates a non linear relationship between government size and economic growth. This study used threshold regression approach in order to test the Armey curve relationship between government size and economic growth in Iran. Two sector production function proposed by Rati Ram (1986) and three indices of government size are used in this paper. The results reveal that a non linear relationship between all indices of government size and economic growth does not exist in Iran.

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This paper examines the existence of β-Convergence between per-capita incomes of selected Islamic countries. For this purpose, data over the period 1965-2006 and a time series approach proposed by Vogelsang (1998) are applied. Robustness of the estimated parameters to the presence of unit roots and/or serial correlations in the residuals is the main advantage of this method. The results show that per-capita income of most countries is converging to the average per-capita income of the selected Islamic countries, which provide evidence of β-Convergence. Cameroon, Indonesia, Malaysia, Niger, Chad, and Togo are the countries that have shown some forms of divergence either before the break date or after that. The estimated break dates are clustered and mostly related to the energy shocks in 1974, 1979, and 1986.