Iranian economy as a state–petroleum economy with inflation and budget deficit challenges, has experienced both large and small business cycles in the last three decades. Obviously, studying the significant causes of these cycles can help the policy makers to design more accurate and efficient plans and policies. In this paper, we use a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model to identify the effective causes of business cycles in Iran. The results show that between 1990 and 2012, budget deficit growth and real exchange rate growth are the most important causes of business cycles in Iran.