The Iranian economy under the Islamic Republic of Iran has experienced 9 exchange rate shocks since the 1979 revolution. In particular, the shocks intensified with the sanctions on Iran in 2011. Many econometric tests have identified the effects of shocks, but the institutional sources of these shocks are underexplored. The contribution of this paper demonstrates that the Iranian macroeconomic dynamics are shaped by institutional factors. Anfal, the exclusive property of res nullius by the supreme jurisconsult, and the Shiite political capitalism deriving from it, foster parallel institutions, specifically parallel public treasuries, and speculative (hoarding) behaviour among agents, which in turn cause recurring exchange rate crises. Different economic policies of fundamentalists and reformists in the Islamic Republic of Iran are critically assessed, and the importance of constitutional elimination of the religious public finance (Anfal) and the creation of a unified secular public finance system is discussed.

The literature lacks consensus on the role of currency regimes in explaining external competitiveness. Countries not only differ in terms of currency regimes, but can also have different institutional arrangements, namely trade agreements and inflation targeting (IT) frameworks in addition to the overall quality of governance. Hence, using the real effective exchange rate and by covering 35 developing countries over the period 1975–2014, we investigate the role of currency regimes in explaining the degree of misalignment while considering institutional factors. First, we find that intermediate regimes limit the currency misalignment with greater financial openness (FO). Second, non-reciprocal preferential trade agreements improve price competitiveness, whereas free trade and reciprocal ones can only be beneficial with a higher degree of FO. Third, misalignments in fixed regimes decline in the presence of stronger institutions or in countries with an IT type of monetary policy framework. The above results remain robust to alternative specifications.

The narrow dating of some of the early New Testament papyri and the methodological approach that is used must be brought into question in the light of the acknowledged difficulties with palaeographical dating and especially the use of assigned dated literary papyri. The thesis of this paper is that the way forward in dating New Testament papyri, or for that matter any undated literary papyri, is first to locate the manuscript in its graphic stream and using, on the whole, dated documentary papyri belonging to the same stream, come to an approximate understanding of where in the history of the stream the manuscript lies. The following New Testament Papyri will be so treated: P52, P67+ and P46.

Speed-accuracy instructions were manipulated in two symbolic stimulus-response compatibility tasks in an event-related potential study with young adults. For both tasks, the stimuli were the words left and right written in upper and lower case. Three late positive peaks (early P3, P3b, and P4) were seen in one task (with compatibility type blocked) with an additional peak (P3c) in the task that required identifying two stimulus attributes (compatibility type signaled by case). In both tasks, stimulus-response incompatibility and an emphasis on accuracy increased reaction time, made the P4 more prominent and increased its latency. With very rapid responding, P4 was not prominent because of overlap with the preceding peak. Functional characteristics of the peaks are discussed as well as potential sources of latency and amplitude measurement error when P3b is measured in a temporal window broad enough to include the P4.