Free trade zones are important regions for development of business activities and detecting important factors for development of these regions plays essential role for development of economy. This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine the factors influencing the performance of the incentive polities of free trade zones in Iran. The study designs a questionnaire consists of 34 questions. Cronbach alpha is equal to 0.809, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. In addition, Bartlett & apos; s Test of Sphericity yields a Chi-Square value of 2392.31 with Sig. = 0.000. Using principal component analysis with rotation, the study has detected six important factors influencing on development of free trade zones including government support, financial capability, development strategy, product competition, infrastructure and consultation services.

In today' s extremely competitive environment, customers are the most important asset of any business and success of any organization depends on loyal customer retention. Therefore, it is important to learn more about different groups of customers and propose appropriate plans to take care of them. Customer segmentation is one of the most common methods to analyze customer’s behavior. The market can be divided into several smaller homogeneous groups, which helps organizations deliver targeted marketing techniques and provides optimized techniques for resource allocation. This paper uses the information gathered from Point of Sales (POS) in one of Iranian private banks and using two methods of K-Means and Kohonen, customers are clustered into four segments to detect the most profitable customers.

Due to the emergent government regulations and stronger public awareness about environment today organizations simply cannot discard environmental concern if these companies want to stay alive in the international market. Environmental management is becoming more and more important for companies for sustainable development. If the industries of developing countries have to export to developed nations they have to match up with developed countries’ environmental standards. The emphasis on the environmental protection is not only due to organizational stakeholders but also governments, customers, employees, competitors and communities. Environmental issues in manufacturing sectors are not investigated appropriately in developing countries. The objectives of this paper are to review the literature on drivers and barriers for the implementation of Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM). After providing a background on GSCM, categories and review the literature on various issues/ factors for the recent GSCM, the concluding remarks for this review is also presented.

Export plays an essential role for boosting the economy of developing countries. On the other hand, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are important part of any economy. Therefore, it is important to determine the effects of various factors influencing on development of export activities. This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of customer segmentation factors on the performance of export activities of SMEs in Iranian food industry. The study selects a sample of 227 people who were involved in development of SMEs in city of Tehran, Iran. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 34 questions, Cronbach alpha and KMO are equal to 0.809 and 0.764, respectively, which are well above the desirable levels. Using principal component analysis, the study has determined that different factors including competitive structure, organizational strategy, customer’s studies and organizational factors influencing the most on promoting export activities.

Lean Manufacturing is being adopted by many Indian industries based on its capability of improving manufacturing performance. Lean Manufacturing supports the concept of delivering the low cost and good quality product to customer by focusing on elimination of waste. Lean Manufacturing employs various elements which aspire to involve the employees to create a customer centric organization. This paper is an attempt to examine the significance of various lean manufacturing elements in Indian industries. Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) approach is used to examine their inter-relationship and ranking based on their driving power and dependence powers through development of diagraph and structural model in the Indian industry context.

We know that Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC) is one of the measures of liquidity management. In this paper, we made an attempt to analyse the impact of CCC on the cash management. In this study we selected five companies from Pharmaceutical Sector, including, Alchemist, Lupin, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratory, Cipla and Ranbaxy. In this study, we used the secondary data for analysis and retrieved from Capitaline database for ten years period from 2002 to 2011. Through cash conversion cycle we can easily determine the working capital requirement. Because, it considers the time gap between expenditure for the purchases of raw materials and collection from sales of finished goods prepared with such raw materials, CCC plays an important role in firm’s short term assets and liabilities as well as success of the firm.

Providing insurance contract with “deductible” is beneficial for both insurer and insured. In this paper, we provide a utility modeling approach to handle insurance pricing and evaluate the tradeoff between discount benefit and deductible level. We analyze four different pricing problems of no insurance, full insurance coverage, insurance with β% deductible and insurance with D-dollar deductible based on a given utility function. A numerical example is also used to illustrate some interesting results.

Cash flow and leverage are two main components of any business firms. A good level of cash flow and leverage shows a desirable performance for business organizations. This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the relationship between combined leverage and cash flow in terms of board of director’s ownership and corporate governance structures. The study selects 86 randomly selected firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2009-2013. Using some statistical tests, the survey has indicated that there was a meaningful relationship between leverage and cash flow for firms with different corporate governance structures. The study has also determined that there was a meaningful relationship between leverage and cash flow for firms with different board of director’s ownerships.

The present study is aimed at investigating the relationship between financial distress and investment efficiency of companies listed in the Tehran Stock Exchange (with emphasis on the role of ownership type). To calculate investment efficiency, the Richardson’s model (2006) [Richardson, S. (2006). Over-investment of free cash flow. Review of Accounting Studies, 11(2-3), 159-189.] was employed. The aim of the present study is applied and its method is correlational- ex post facto. Using the exclusion sampling method and by applying the conditions of selecting the sample, 94 companies were selected from 2008 to 2013. To test the research hypotheses, multiple regression was used. Findings of the research indicate that there was a correlation between financial distress and investment efficiency in companies listed in the Tehran Stock Exchange, and institutional ownership had positive effects on the relationship between financial distress and investment efficiency of companies listed in the Tehran Stock Exchange. Furthermore, management ownership had no effect on the relationship between financial distress and investment efficiency in companies listed in the Tehran Stock Exchange.

One of the most important factors of survival of financial institutes and banks in the current competitive markets is to create balance and equality among resources and consumptions as well as to keep the health of money circulation in these institutes. According to the experiences obtained from recent financial crises in the world. The lack of appropriate management of the demands of banks and financial institutions can be considered as one of the main factors of occurrence of this crisis. The objective of the present study is to identify and classify customers according to credit risk and decisions of predictive models. The present research is a survey research employing field study in terms of the data collection method. The method of collecting theoretical framework was library research and the data were collected by two ways of data of a questionnaire and real customers’ financial data. To analyze the data of the questionnaire, analytical hierarchy process and to analyze real customers’ financial data, the TOPSIS method were employed. The population of the study included files of real customers in one of the branches of RefahKargaran Bank in city of Tabriz, Iran. From among 800 files, 140 files were completed and using Morgan’s table, 103 files were investigated. The final model was presented and with 95% of probability, if the next customer’s data is entered the model, it will capable of identifying accurately the degree of customer risk.