This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine whether or there is any difference between the returns of two value and growth portfolios, sorted by price-to-earnings (P/E) and price-to-book value (P/BV), in terms of the ratios of market sensitivity to index (β), firm size and market liquidity in listed firms in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) over the period 2001-2008. The selected firms were collected from those with existing two-consecutive positive P/E and P/BV ratios and by excluding financial and holding firms. There were five independent variables for the proposed study of this paper including P/E, P/B, market size, market sensitivity beta (β) and market liquidity. In each year, we first sort firms in non-decreasing order and setup four set of portfolios with equal firms. Therefore, the first portfolio with the lowest P/E ratio is called value portfolio and the last one with the highest P/E ratio is called growth portfolio. This process was repeated based on P/BV ratio to determine value and growth portfolios, accordingly. The study investigated the characteristics of two portfolios based on firm size, β and liquidity. The study has implemented t-student and Levin’s test to examine different hypotheses and the results have indicated mix effects of market sensitivity, firm size and market liquidity on returns of the firms in various periods.

There is a concern that auditors and the public may have different beliefs about the auditors’ responsibilities and the messages delivered by audit reports. During the past few years, some spectacular and well‐publicized corporates such as Anderson consulting collapse and the subsequent implication of the reporting auditors have emphasized on the audit expectation gap. It appears that public misperceptions represent a major reason for the legal liability crisis facing the accounting profession. The objective of this paper is to present an empirical investigation on the audit expectation gap for some privately hold firms in Iran. The population of this survey includes two groups of official auditing officials and management of some privately held firms. The results of the survey have indicated that there were some meaningful difference between management and audit group’s perceptions in terms of the auditors’ roles and responsibilities. However, there was no meaningful relationship between management and audit group’s perceptions in terms of the auditors’ independence.

Cash is the life blood of the organizations and cash management is the important aspect of any organization. Corporate cash management boosts the companies from small to giant in the competitive environment. In this study, we highlighted three factors of a good cash management practices; namely cash conversion cycle, cash holding and credit score. Influence of one factor to other help organizations manage their corporate cash more appropriately. In this study, we collected data from Capitaline corporate data base of Mumbai over the period 2002-2011. In this study we observed that due to higher credit score, companies were forced to minimize their cash conversion cycle and helped them maintain lower levels of working capital.

Consumer credit risk assessment involves the implementation of risk assessment techniques to manage a borrower’s account from the event of pre-screening a potential application through to the management of the account during its life-cycle and possible write-off. This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the relationship between 13 different factors such as credit history, applications’ educational and management skills, etc. and credit risk. The study selects the profiles of 380 applicants who received loans from one of Iranian banks named Bank Mellat in city of Tehran, Iran over the period 2010-2011. Using Pearson correlation, the study has determined a meaningful relationship between applicants’ profiles including credit history, business characteristics, personal characteristics, etc. and credit risk.

Capital structure is a controversial issue in the field of corporate finance. There are several studies to find a way to determine the optimal capital structure to minimize the cost of capital and maximize the corporate value. In fact, capital structure is a combination of firms’ liabilities and capital to meet long term assets. This paper investigates the role of the hierarchical theory in explaining the capital structure of the firms based on enterprise life cycle model on selected firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) using three methods of net equities, net liabilities and retained earnings. The study uses Park and Chen’s (2006) method [Park, Y., & Chen, K. H. (2006). The effect of accounting conservatism and life-cycle stages on firm valuation. Journal of Applied Business Research (JABR), 22(3), 75-92.] to categorize the life cycle of 81 randomly selected firms from TSE over the period 2007-2012. The results indicate that the hierarchical theory represents the growing firms better than the matured firms do. The results also show that firms were more willing to reduce their dividend per share for financing their projects.

Today Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) still remains as an attempt alone. For more than a decade, supply chain evolution to be a low carbon chain in an energy and resource constrained world has been posing greater challenges. Though environmental policies remain without much variation towards green operations in an industry, the implantation strategies and stages vary. There have been a number of studies by researchers and a lot of endeavors by organizations to build a green supply chain, mainly because of pressure from the professional bodies like EPA, WEEE, OECD, and Clean Air Act to reduce emissions with growing concerns over climate change issues, global warming, and requirements from policy makers, end users, stake holders and others. But, at the implementation level there lacked a proper framework on GSCM which suggests guidelines for proper planning and coordination, and the practices to be adopted. This indicates the need for a complete strategic approach on the part of decision makers across the supply chain to have sustainability as a corporate social responsibility. The research gap exists in a holistic perception with regard to a product when supply chain stages are mapped for sustainability due to diverse environmental issues. Also, to build a holistic approach, we must know how the stages and levels interact. Thus, in this work, a Parametric Matrix demarking various level and stages of a supply chain related to a product, in general, is developed from various literatures till date. Such a metric will be useful for the industries to identify the bottleneck areas in their supply chain towards sustainability. Hence, the desired and relevant level of factors to be considered at each stage to become green can easily be decided.

Recently, there have been significant development on e-business and nearly all business partners try to offer their products and services via internet. One primary question for the implementation of e-business is to measure the effect of this new facility on supply chain in project based organizations. Although e-business may not directly influence on organizational performance, it definitely influences on unifying customers and suppliers, which yields to a better performance of organizations. This study performs a study to measure the indirect effect of e-business on project based organizational performance. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 140 professional experts in different industries in province of Ontario, Canada. The survey examines different hypotheses for a possible correlation between e-business and integrated suppliers, e-business and customers, integrated customers and suppliers with organizational performance. The results of this survey indicate a positive relationship between all these components either directly or indirectly.

The objective of the present study is to determine the start times and ordering plans for two-period projects in project-oriented organizations. The following assumptions are made: orders can be placed in either of a project’s two consecutive periods; and the same raw materials are used, which are ordered at the start of the periods according to their interdependent demands. The main innovation of the present research is to develop a model that is mainly based on the two-period newsvendor problem, but assumes that demand is interdependent, i.e. it is actually a combination of inventory and project management. After presenting the model, numerical meth-ods are used to approximate the order quantities for each period. Near-optimal solutions of a numerical example, in a case study on molding industry, are obtained using a genetic algorithm. Results show that the proposed model with interdependent demand provides a better solution than independent demand. The model is applicable to large-scale industrial and construction pro-jects where the majority of raw materials have of the same nature.

Sentiment is a powerful psychological force that can significantly affect employee behavior and performance. However, workplace emotions are still an issue to be studied, especially in the field of sales management in project based organizations. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of emotional intelligence and flexibility on the tendency of employees to leave the organization. The method of this research is descriptive correlational and in a survey method and it is a practical purpose. The statistical population of this study includes all 108 employees of the representatives of selected insurance firms in city of Zanjan, Iran. Using Cochran formula, 84 people were selected as the statistical sample. The results have indicated that while there was a positive and meaningful relationship between emotional intelligence and flexibility (r = 0.534, Sig. = 0.000), there were negative and meaningful relationships between flexibility and emotion-al intelligence on one side and intend to leave an organization on the other side.

One of the primary concerns for investment in oil and gas projects is to have a comprehensive understanding on different issues associated with this industry. The industry is mainly influ-enced by the price of oil and gas and in some events, many production units have been forced to shut down solely because of low price of oil and gas. Environmental issues are other important factors, which may put pressure on Canada’s political affairs since the country has strong com-mitment to reduce green gas effect. In this paper, we introduce a multi-criteria decision making method, which helps us rank different projects in terms of investment. The proposed study con-siders different investment factors including net present value, rate of return, benefit-cost analy-sis and payback period along with the intensity of green gas effects for ranking the present oil and gas projects in Canada.