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Purpose: Following the COVID-19 outbreak, there are concerns whether economies are becoming farther from equality and competency. While this matters to every economy, it is more crucial for developing ones who already suffer from income inequalities and lack of competency. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses an administrative data from the Iran's Social Security Organization (ISSO) that provides insurance to workers entitled to the Labor Law of Iran. The data contain more than 7,000,000 workers. The authors assess heterogeneous impact of the first wave of the pandemic by firms' size and average payment. Findings: The authors' estimation results indicate that, following the initiation of the pandemic, the workers whose corresponding firms are smaller, overall, are more prone to the pandemic and are more likely to submit a request for unemployment benefits. However, the relation is neither homogeneous across sectors nor linear among micro-sized firms. Few sectors indicate a positive relationship between size and likelihood of request submission, including cultural activity, shoemaking and clothing sectors. Besides the size, the authors investigate whether pay grades could explain the probability of becoming unemployed after the pandemic. Results show that workers whose corresponding firms pay less are more likely to submit a request. This is robust within different sectors. Research limitations/implications: The ISSO dataset is not a panel, so the authors cannot employ methods of causal inferences. The authors' results should be seen as correlation; however, due to exogeneity and sharpness of the pandemic the result infers to some degree of causality. The data does not cover the informal sector, so the estimates are at lower boundary. Originality/value: Administrative data on unemployment benefits during COVID-19 show that the pandemic interferes with competition by forcing low-paid workers and small firms to exit the market. This is an alarm for the competition in every economy, specially developing ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to investigate the excessive changes in the exchange rate in Iran during 2018 due to extreme speculation in the monetary and currency markets caused by numerous economic and political factors such as accumulated excessive liquidity, severe sanctions and foreign pressures. Based on purchasing power parity (PPP) theory, the foreign exchange rate has to be adjusted with the inflation rate. However, this study showed that in the critical situations the PPP theory, which adopts a long‐term and backward‐looking approach, no longer works, and instead the market tends to adopt a short‐term and prospective approach to exchange rates. In this study, the economic data of Iran and the United States were gathered from late 1978 to 21 September 2018, and by adding three other economic factors, including the difference of average annual growth rate of GDP per capita of 2% between the two countries, indicator of risk in low volatility period (1.16%) and high volatility one (1.49%), a new and risk‐based approach is presented based on the low and high volatility of the exchange rates to address the excessive changes not explained by conventional theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compulsory military service, due to its timing in the lives of men (at a young age, which is the key period for increasing human capital) and its length (in many cases, about a year and a half to two years), implies a significant cost (explicit or implicit) for them. Individual costs incurred as a result of compulsory military service is an important aspect to consider when measuring the economic and social costs of enforcing conscription. Compulsory military service has been a part of Iranian government policy since 1925. Accordingly, an attempt to estimate the cost for men in Iran is the main subject of this paper. We will estimate the willingness of men to pay for exemption from compulsory military service based on the dichotomous choice contingent valuation model (One-and-One-Half Bounded approach). The mean of willingness to pay is estimated at 1.61 billion Rials (38,000 USD) while the median of willingness to pay is 1.64 billion Rials. A calculation of the median of willingness to pay for sub-groups of respondents shows that individuals with an income of more than 70 million Rials (1670 USD) per month have the highest median of willingness to pay, followed by those with a Ph.D. degree, and finally, undergraduates are individuals with the lowest median of willingness to pay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]