About This Site

Thanks for stopping by my site.

What sparks the creation of this new site? There are likely as many stimuli as there are finance sites. For me, it was the desire to address the Iranian scholars, researchers and finance students on various aspects of financial economics and management; the same stimuli that led me to propose some new financial courses in the last 25 years of my career in Iran.

I must confess that during all these years, I have strived to stay ahead of the curve when it came to competing with my Ph.D. students. Even today, I tease them by telling them that in Iran, I intend soon to offer a popular Entrepreneurial Finance Course.

With all the excitement about the Internet and other technological wonders, and given my executive engagements which make me in practice a part time academician, I felt that having a strong site is the only crucial vehicle to address and keep contact with Iranian financial academicians and students, and to prepare a sufficiently well-structured course in the curricula of my Ph.D. students.

In our country, this is a fact, that no area has become quite so fascinating for students so quickly as finance and investment. We have an environment that is awfully receptive to introducing new ideas and courses in finance. This field needs creativity and innovation and any innovative move indeed has a strong likelihood of success. That explains why I expect a great success for the Persian version of this site.

My current sincere and genuine zeal to develop and maintain a top rated Persian language financial site not only stems from my early love for finance—both as a student and as a practitioner—and from my fondness to be an innovator in the field, but it also drives from the necessity I feel such a reference might have for Iranian addressees.

For Iranian students, the site also explores how firms create and help to manage their investments in the financial markets they are in. This will hopefully provide a new framework for organizing our thoughts in Iran about a national financial strategy in a globalalized world.

Let us hope that for Iranian audience, this basically finance site will cover all the facets of financial theory and practice including some materials on how launching a financial business, from marketing to drawing up a business plan, and some free guidance on how to maximize your cash and keep it flowing.

In this country, we need people to take the lead in developing a full slate of new advanced finance or investment courses such as financial engineering or entrepreneurship finance, and put together a procedure for bringing in those closest to the material—managers and entrepreneurs—to teach them. Accordingly, in this site, I have also presented a full package of materials for a financial theory course that I currently teach.

Twenty-five years ago, when I offered the first Iranian financial management case-based course at undergraduate level, more than 120 students enrolled in the course, which was offered for the first time on fall semester.

My current offered finance course yet addressing many cases (some of which focus on international companies) has gone through some very important changes. It now certainly has a more international body and a more globally oriented content.

In my opinion, one of the stronger elements of a good financial manager or student is the ability to use information technology; they need to know how to leverage it. Out of this understanding, I have created my course in a way to look into the strategic impact of information technology in the area of finance. 

The syllabus for the Ph.D. course on financial theory in its current form grew out of the experiences of the classes taught during the last three years, when I joined IRPD as an associate professor in the spring of 1998. The designed course focuses on the intersection between financial theory and management theory. I expanded the material to include the context of Iranian organizational culture. Of course, this could not be a one-size-fits-all solution.  For every Iranian business, based on the theoretical content of this course, any would-be manager attending the course, has to look at how three areas overlap: information technology, financial strategy and financial economies.

This course aims to provide students with the opportunity to discuss the complex theoretical and empirical issues and problems of finance. The course has a heavy emphasis on current events and recent developments in international finance theory. We will discuss also issues such as the introduction of Euro, the East Asian financial crisis and the role of World Bank and IMF in the global financial market. The first half of the course will be devoted to lectures, the second part will consist of case studies that are basically applications of finance theory in the real world. The format of my course is lecture, class discussion, and presentations by students. Course works will include homework assignments, exam(s), and a term paper. 

I will also discuss the impact of government policies on financial behavior of investors, corporations and any other private institution of the society.  Governments, especially in a developing country, have unusual power; in that government has final say about the rules of contracts, resource allocation, and all manners of other social behaviors.  Thus, the study of the economic impact of governmental decisions related to taxation, spending of social resources, and financing (whether in the form of debt or equity in state-owned enterprises) is no minor matter.  

The decisions of financial agents are shaped, not only by the legally enforceable “rules of the financial game,” but also by the macroeconomic environment generated from government decisions in public finance.  

This course is designed to provide students with the tools to analyze finance decisions and to have a better sense of the social implications of such decisions.  Students in this “speaking intensive” Ph.D. seminar are expected to debate a range of controversial arguments, hypotheses, and empirical presentations relevant to making sense of the state of theory of finance today.  As a seminar course, it is expected that students will come to this debate with a strong preparation in financial theory, as well as some familiarity with issues of game theory and strategic management. As a speaking intensive course, students are required to not only participate in these debates but, on occasion, to take the lead in organizing the debates and to present their own unique research thesis to the class.  

Among the objectives of this course is to encourage students to think analytically, to recognize the components of constructing a theory (concepts, logic, coherence), and to develop their skill at producing effective spoken arguments. These skills are valuable in the academic endeavor, in general, and to the study of financial economics, in particular.

While preparing for the course, I have assembled almost every finance text on various financial and investment issues that I could find in Iran or on Internet. 

Now a day, after twenty-five years, there is a better time to think about Iran-specific finance course; nor has there been a better time to talk about financial innovations and their impact on Iranian developing economy; what I have tried to present on this site.

I look with great envy on those professors who can get out their overhead transparencies year after year and get good use out of them! On the contrary, I believe that in order to maintain this site’s relevancy, I have to turn over between 20 and 25 percent of the material each year, as well as doubling its content. I need to continually design a new organization for the site. The need for a new organizational structure will also become apparent as students and people keep writing to me providing new information and links to be stored on this site. In addition, I should also make some tentative plans for creating and expanding a book review section for this site. This is one of the things that drives me crazy; there are all kinds of new books in finance published every year, from all kinds of sources, but I have not had time to look at them.

So, I will do my best to continue working on the enrichment of the content and organization of this site, tooling around until it behaves itself. In developing this site, my goal has been to provide my friends and you with a multiple-purpose comprehensive Persian language finance site, while continuously adding new materials to the site. Your feedback will help me achieve my goal, and I thank you for taking the time to complete this site.