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The representation of kinship relationships in Persian proverbs has been studied in this research. Method of the research is descriptive-analytic and during that some proverbs were extracted from the Great Dictionary of Persian Proverbs and those proverbs which were from non-Persian languages and dialects were deleted. Finally, 3332 Persian proverbs relevant to kinship relationships have been received. The proverbs were firstly classified based on kinship mentioned on them and abundance of the proverbs of each kinship received. Then based on Murdock Theory, kinfolks were classified and compared according to the kind of kinship, marriage kinship, blood or half-blood kinship, the degree of kinship, first, second and third degree and far kinship. Gender, generation and decent of kinfolk, gender of self and kind of family were also considered and were set as the basis for comparison of the mentioned kinship in the proverbs. Those proverbs related to the woman (as the wife) are more than the other kinfolks, while those proverbs related to marriage kinship are more than blood and half-blood kinship. After the woman, father has the second place and the child has the third one. Female kinfolks were mentioned more than male kinfolks in the proverbs, but at the same time, the abundance of those proverbs relevant to men kinfolks are more than women kinfolks.

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Efficiency of economical units especially banks is one of the success factors in developed countries. In this regard, managers of the banks are responsible for the efficiency of them, which is not possible without evaluation of efficiency of the bank branches under the supervision of the managers. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a method for calculating the efficiency of various organizations having multiple-inputs multiple-outputs. This method leads to ordering of efficient and inefficient branches and identifying reference unit (DMU) to attain efficiency frontier. Also, effectiveness of each variable in efficiency of each unit can be determined. In this research, an input-oriented BCC model with envelopment form has been employed. Thus, the statistical data from 17 branches of Refah Kargaran Bank in Lorestan Province was collected during 2010-2011. The results show that there are 11 efficient branches (65% of the branches) and 6 inefficient branches. Inefficient branches were ranked in terms of their efficiency, and AP model was used for ranking of the efficient branches. Finally, TOPSIS was applied for ranking of the branches in order to verify the results.

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This paper aims to study the relationship between intellectual property and patent protection and economic growth in Iran using Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique during 1979 – 2010. This model is based on economic growth models in 1990s. The number of patents is used to measure the impact of patents on economic growth. Moreover, we investigate the casual relationships among economic growth, degree of economic openness, foreign direct investment, information and communication technology (ICT) and human development. The results indicate that patent protection has a positive and significant impact on economic growth. Furthermore, the casual relationships from degree of economic openness, foreign direct investment, ICT and human development to economic growth are positively significant. Based on numerical results, one-unit increases in ICT, HDI, patents, government expenditure and oil revenues lead to 0.10, 0.12, 0.10, 0.39 and 0.21 percent increase in economic growth respectively. Hence, we conclude that the higher intellectual property and patent protection results in high economic growth.