Journal of Economic Modeling Research

---

The Iranian electricity market is undergoing the first decade of restructuring. Effective competition in wholesale electricity market is a necessary feature of successful electricity industry restructuring. The paper examines the degree of competition in the Iranian electricity market during March to September 2009. The competitive benchmark analysis has been used to simulate producer’s behavior as a price taker firms and compare the competitive market results with actual market outcomes. The competitive benchmark has been calculated through generation costs of producers. Moreover, the possibility of execution market power has been considered by structural index. The finding indicates that the Iranian electricity market has a considerable potential to exercise power market and there were significant departure from competitive behavior during 2009.

---

One of the important targets of the economic planning is economic growth via enhancement of the labor productivity. In this regard, education expenditures play a crucial role. This study aims at investigating the effect of education expenditures on the level of human capital and economic growth through a computable general equilibrium approach. The data on economic variables and social accounting matrix belongs to the year 2001. Three scenarios on education expenditures are defined and their effect on human capital and economic growth are estimated. The results show that education expenditures have positive effects on economic growth and human capital. A 50% increase in education expenditures in the first period causes 3.81 and 5.8 percent increase in human capital and economic growth respectively. In the second period, the same increase in education expenditures affects human capital and economic growth positively by 5.4 and 7.3 percent respectively. Although separating the economic growth into human and physical factors in the first period shows that there is no relationship between human capital and economic growth, but in second period this separation causes a relationship between the two factors.

---

In Islamic and conventional banks, there may always be differences in efficiency, cost gap ratio and credit risk; Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between credit risk, cost gap ratio and efficiency of banks in selected Islamic and conventional countries. For this purpose, credit risk, efficiency and cost gap ratio were calculated for 50 Islamic banks and 50 non-Islamic (conventional) banks during the years 2013-2019 and regard, the results of the t-test showed that the credit risk, inefficiency and cost gap ratio are higher in Islamic banks than conventional banks. Also, the results of the Granger causality test showed that there is a bidirectional causality relationship between inefficiency and credit risk. But this relationship is a little weak. There is no causal relationship between credit risk and cost gap ratio, and there is a strong two-way causality relationship between inefficiency and cost gap ratio. The results in Islamic banks are almost similar to all banks. However, in Islamic banks, credit risk is not the Grangerian cause of inefficiency. Also, the significance level of other causal relationships is much higher. For conventional banks, there is no causal relationship between inefficiency and credit risk. There is no causal relationship between credit risk and cost gap ratio, and there is a two-way causality relationship between inefficiency and cost gap ratio. In addition, the results of variance analysis indicate that the cost gap and inefficiency have a close relationship with each other and their effectiveness is high. Credit risk also has a more or less effect on inefficiency during future periods. In Islamic banks, the effects of inefficiency and cost gap on credit risk are slightly higher. But the inefficiency of the cost gap has a high effectiveness. In conventional banks, credit risk has the same effectiveness as Islamic banks, but its effectiveness is somewhat less. Also, inefficiency has less effects than the cost gap. The cost gap, like Islamic banks, has a high effectiveness of inefficiency, and this effectiveness decreases over time.