This paper presents a study to determine demand for electricity in city of Yazd, Iran over the period of 1998-2008. Using vector error correction model (VECM) based on seasonal information, the study determines that electricity has no elasticity in short term in household expenditure. Therefore, government policy on increasing price of electricity will not influence demand. However, electricity maintains elasticity over the long-term period and an increase on price of electricity could motivate consumers to reduce their consumption by purchasing energy efficient facilities. Therefore, any governmental strategy to increase price may have positive impact on economy. The study also detects a positive and meaningful relationship between temperature and electricity consumption.

One of the most important issues in urban planning programs is to allocate necessary spaces for educational applications. Selecting appropriate locations for training centers increases students & apos; mental capabilities. Suitable location for the establishment of educational facilities is the first fundamental step for development of educational systems. The selection of optimal sites for educational facilities involves numerous parameters and it is essential to use multiple criteria decision making approaches to make wise decisions. This paper presents an empirical investigation on facility layout planning for educational systems in city of Birjand, Iran. Using fuzzy GIS as well as analytical hierarchy process (AHP), the study determines the most appropriate candidates for training centers.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine important factors influencing on selection of petrochemical market. The survey has accomplished among 97 randomly selected experts in petrochemical industry in Iran. The survey designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some experts and using binomial test; it has confirmed that except one factor, cultural affairs, other issues including political, cultural, regulations, economic, infrastructure, market potential, buyers’ potentials and buyer’s positions influence on market development. The implementation of Freedman test has indicated that Buyers’ positions are number one priority followed by buyers’ potentials, rules and regulations.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to see whether or not there is any relationship between profit conservatism and investment sensitivity and efficiency of investments in listed companies of Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). Using regression analysis, the study investigates whether there is any relationship between conservatism and sensitivity of investments, between profit conservatism and efficiency of company’s investments and between conservatism ability to create profit and cash in accepted TSE firms. The study chooses a sample of 102 firms from TSE market over the period 2005-2011 and the results confirmed that there were positive and meaningful relationship between all variables of the survey (? = 5%).

Markowitz theorem is one of the most popular techniques for asset management. The method has been widely used to solve many applications, successfully. In this paper, we present a multi objective Markowitz model to determine asset allocation by considering cardinality constraints. The resulted model is an NP-Hard problem and the proposed study uses two metaheuristics, namely genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to find efficient solutions. The proposed study has been applied on some data collected from Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2009-2011. The study considers four objectives including cash return, 12-month return, 36-month return and Lower Partial Moment (LPM). The results indicate that there was no statistical difference between the implementation of PSO and GA methods.

This paper examined the effects of cognitive emotion regulation on employees’ job satisfaction. In this survey, Questionnaire and the questions were divided into two categories of cognitive emotion regulation and job satisfaction. To measure cognitive emotion regulation, including unadjusted emotion regulation strategies and adjusted strategies, 36 items questionnaire was used originally developed by Garnefski et al. (2001) [Garnefski, N., Kraaij, V., & Spinhoven, P. (2001). Negative life events, cognitive emotion regulation, and emotional problems. Personality and Individual Differences, 30, 1311–1327.]. The questionnaires were distributed among 340 staff employee of the Islamic Republic of Iran Customs Administration. The results revealed that the adjusted cognitive emotion regulation strategies increase job satisfaction of employees. However, unadjusted cognitive emotion regulation strategies reduce employees & apos; job satisfaction. Moreover, among adjusted emotion regulation strategies, put in perspective strategy did not have significant effect on job satisfaction and rumination, had no significant effect on job satisfaction, which was one of the unadjusted strategies of cognitive emotion regulation.

In project management literature, the concept of program is a group of related projects managed in a coordinated way to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually. This paper attempts to identify program critical success factors focusing on Iran’s construction industry so that the level of relative importance of various factors could be determined for key stakeholders. Furthermore, since a program includes a set of projects, another objective of this study is to find out whether the projects of program are accomplished, successfully or not. Therefore, to run this study, first literature of topic based on research keywords is reviewed. Then a conceptual model including all the aspects of program success factors is presented. Next, critical success factors are quantitatively analyzed by performing an empirical investigation on active organizations and firms of Iran’s construction industry. The study employs questionnaire and performs interview surveys with construction program professionals and experts. Finally, the critical success factors of program are sorted according to their ranks. The results show that program-related factors maintain the highest effects on program success followed by organization-related and project-related issues.

Banking industry plays essential role for development of macro economy by giving loans to growing business plans and helping economy grow, properly. A bank normally pays a low interest to people who deposit their money into banks and collects interest from people who receive funds. When there is a healthy growth on banks’ deposit, banks’ managers hope to attract business owners to finance their projects through banks and pay interests. The proposed study of this paper investigates the relationship between lending facility and bank deposits. In addition, the study tries to find out about the possible methods for increasing bank deposits and consequently social investment. Based on the results of our survey, increasing facilities, by assuming all other conditions was remained constant, which increased banks’ deposit. In fact, people worked more with banks and branches and conveyed their resources to the banks that granted more deposits. The role of location was so effective to attract deposits so that we must consider the relationship between deposit and the amount of facility payment with location.

This paper studies the effects of cash conversion cycle (CCC) and size of selected firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) on four variables including return of assets, return of equities, tangible assets and equity multiplier. The study selects a sample of 105 firms listed on TSE and divides them into two groups of big and small sized companies over the period 2008-2012. Using a regression analysis, the study confirmed a meaningful relationship between different variables. In other words, in our survey, CCC and size negatively influence on tangible assets, they positively influence on equity multiplier as well as ROA but the effects of CCC and size on ROE for small and big firms are mixed.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of information and communication technology (ICT) on total quality management (TQM). The study is applied for a case study of revenue agency in city of Damghan, Iran. The proposed study consists of 33 questions in five categories including leadership and commitment of top management team, customer satisfaction, empowering employees and their partnership, organizational design perspective and quality of information system. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.95, which validates the overall questionnaire. Using Pearson correlation ratio as well as t-student test, the study has determined that there was a positive and meaningful relationship between ICT and TQM components.