The automation technology is emerging, but the adoption rate of autonomous vehicles (AV) will largely depend upon how policymakers and the government address various challenges such as public acceptance and infrastructure development. This study proposes a five-step method to understand these barriers to AV adoption. First, based on a literature review followed by discussions with experts, ten barriers are identified. Second, the opinions of eighteen experts from industry and academia regarding inter-relations between these barriers are recorded. Third, a multicriteria decision making (MCDM) technique, the grey-based Decision-making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (Grey-DEMATEL), is applied to characterize the structure of relationships between the barriers. Fourth, the robustness of the results is tested using sensitivity analysis. Fifth, the key results are depicted in a causal loop diagram (CLD), a systems thinking approach, to comprehend cause-and-effect relationships between the barriers. The results indicate that the lack of customer acceptance (LCA) is the most prominent barrier, the one which should be addressed at the highest priority. The CLD suggests that LCA can be rather mitigated by addressing two other prominent, yet more tangible, barriers -- lack of industry standards and the absence of regulations and certifications. The study's overarching contribution thus lies in bringing to fore multiple barriers to AV adoption and their potential influences on each other, owing to which its insights are relevant to associations related to AVs in prioritizing their endeavors to expedite AV adoption. From the methodological perspective, this is the first study in transportation literature that integrates Grey-DEMATEL with systems thinking.

Various works have already showed that common shocks and cross-country financial linkages caused the banking systems of several countries to be highly interconnected with the result that during bad times, banking crises may arise simultaneously in different countries. Our aim is to provide further evidence on the topic using a dataset made by dichotomous banking crises time series for 66 countries from 1800 to 2014. Via the use of heatmap matrices we show that several countries exhibit pairwise correlation, which means that banking crises tend to occur in the same year. Clustering analysis suggests that developed countries (for the most European ones) are highly similar in terms of the path of events. An analysis of the events that followed the Great Depression and the Great Recession shows that after the crisis of 2008, banking crises tend to characterize countries tied by financial links whereas before 2008 contagion seems to affect countries in the same geographical area. Clustering analysis shows also that after financial liberalization, crises affected countries with similar economic structures and growth. Further researches should enlighten the origin of these linkages investigating how the process of contagion eventually happens.

In this paper, we propose a gated deep neural network model to predict implied volatility surfaces. Conventional financial conditions and empirical evidence related to the implied volatility are incorporated into the neural network architecture design and calibration including no static arbitrage, boundaries, asymptotic slope and volatility smile. They are also satisfied empirically by the option data on the S&P 500 over a ten years period. Our proposed model outperforms the widely used surface stochastic volatility inspired model on the mean average percentage error in both in-sample and out-of-sample datasets. The research of this study has a fundamental methodological contribution to the emerging trend of applying the state-of-the-art information technology into business studies as our model provides a framework of integrating data-driven machine learning algorithms with financial theories and this framework can be easily extended and applied to solve other problems in finance or other business fields.

In the global economy, the intermediate companies owned by multinational corporations are becoming an important policy issue as they are likely to cause international profit shifting and diversion of foreign direct investments. The purpose of this analysis is to call the intermediate companies with high risk of international profit shifting as key firms and to identifying and clarify them. For this aim, we propose a model that focuses on each affiliate's position on the ownership structure of each multinational corporation. Based on the information contained in the Orbis database, we constructed the Global Ownership Network, reflecting the relationship that can give significant influence to a firm, and analyzed for large multinational corporations listed in Fortune Global 500. In this analysis, first, we confirmed the validity of this model by identifying affiliates playing an important role in international tax avoidance at a certain degree. Secondly, intermediate companies are mainly found in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, etc., and tended to be located in jurisdictions favorable to treaty shopping. And it was found that such key firms are concentrated on the IN component of the bow-tie structure that the giant weakly connected component of the Global Ownership Network consist of. Therefore, it clarifies that the key firms are geographically located in specific jurisdictions, and concentrates on specific components in the Global Ownership Network. The location of key firms are related with the ease of treaty shopping, and there is a difference in the jurisdiction where key firms are located depending on the location of the multinational corporations.

Motivated by empirical evidence for rough volatility models, this paper investigates the continuous-time mean-variance (MV) portfolio selection under Volterra Heston model. Due to the non-Markovian and non-semimartingale nature of the model, classic stochastic optimal control frameworks are not directly applicable to the associated optimization problem. By constructing an auxiliary stochastic process, we obtain the optimal investment strategy that depends on the solution to a Riccati-Volterra equation. The MV efficient frontier is shown to maintain a quadratic curve. Numerical studies show that both roughness and volatility of volatility affect the optimal strategy materially.

The VIX call options for the Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard models will be discussed. Derivatives written on the VIX, which is the most popular volatility measurement, have been traded actively very much. In this paper, we give representations of the VIX call option price for the Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard models: non-Gaussian Ornstein--Uhlenbeck type stochastic volatility models. Moreover, we provide representations of the locally risk-minimizing strategy constructed by a combination of the underlying riskless and risky assets. Remark that the representations obtained in this paper are efficient to develop a numerical method using the fast Fourier transform. Thus, numerical experiments will be implemented in the last section of this paper.

The Artificial Intelligence paradigm (hereinafter referred to as "AI") builds on the analysis of data able, among other things, to snap pictures of the individuals' behaviors and preferences. Such data represent the most valuable currency in the digital ecosystem, where their value derives from their being a fundamental asset in order to train machines with a view to developing AI applications. In this environment, online providers attract users by offering them services for free and getting in exchange data generated right through the usage of such services. This swap, characterized by an implicit nature, constitutes the focus of the present paper, in the light of the disequilibria, as well as market failures, that it may bring about. We use mobile apps and the related permission system as an ideal environment to explore, via econometric tools, those issues. The results, stemming from a dataset of over one million observations, show that both buyers and sellers are aware that access to digital services implicitly implies an exchange of data, although this does not have a considerable impact neither on the level of downloads (demand), nor on the level of the prices (supply). In other words, the implicit nature of this exchange does not allow market indicators to work efficiently. We conclude that current policies (e.g. transparency rules) may be inherently biased and we put forward suggestions for a new approach.

Recent studies have found that the log-volatility of asset returns exhibit roughness. This study investigates roughness or the anti-persistence of Bitcoin volatility. Using the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis, we obtain the generalized Hurst exponent of the log-volatility increments and find that the generalized Hurst exponent is less than $1/2$, which indicates log-volatility increments that are rough. Furthermore, we find that the generalized Hurst exponent is not constant. This observation indicates that the log-volatility has multifractal property. Using shuffled time series of the log-volatility increments, we infer that the source of multifractality partly comes from the distributional property.

Financial asset markets are sociotechnical systems whose constituent agents are subject to evolutionary pressure as unprofitable agents exit the marketplace and more profitable agents continue to trade assets. Using a population of evolving zero-intelligence agents and a frequent batch auction price-discovery mechanism as substrate, we analyze the role played by evolutionary selection mechanisms in determining macro-observable market statistics. In particular, we show that selection mechanisms incorporating a local fitness-proportionate component are associated with high correlation between a micro, risk-aversion parameter and a commonly-used macro-volatility statistic, while a purely quantile-based selection mechanism shows significantly less correlation.

In risk management, tail risks are of crucial importance. The assessment of risks should be carried out in accordance with the regulatory authority's requirement at high quantiles. In general, the underlying distribution function is unknown, the database is sparse, and therefore special tail models are used. Very often, the generalized Pareto distribution is employed as a basic model, and its parameters are determined with data from the tail area. With the determined tail model, statisticians then calculate the required high quantiles. In this context, we consider the possible accuracy of the calculation of the quantiles and determine the finite sample distribution function of the quantile estimator, depending on the confidence level and the parameters of the tail model, and then calculate the finite sample bias and the finite sample variance of the quantile estimator. Finally, we present an impact analysis on the quantiles of an unknown distribution function.