This paper makes the first attempt to introduce the tools from computer graphics into the art pricing research. We argue that the creation of a painting calls for a combination of conceptual effort and painting effort from the artist. However, as the important price determinants, both efforts are long missing in the traditional hedonic model because they are hard to measure. This paper draws on the digital pictures of auctioned paintings from various renowned artists, and applies the image recognition techniques to measure the variances of lines and colors of these paintings. We then use them as the proxies for the artist's painting effort, and include them in the hedonic regression to test their significance. Our results show that the variances of lines and colors of a painting can significantly positively explain the sales price in a general context. Our suggested measurements can better capture the content heterogeneity of paintings hence improving on the traditional art pricing methodology. Our approach also provides a quantitative perspective for both valuation and authentication of paintings.

Myanmar is languishing at the bottom of key international indexes. United Nations considers the country as a structurally weak and vulnerable economy. Yet, from 2011 when Myanmar ended decades of military rule and isolationism and transited towards democracy, its breakneck development has led to many considering the country to be one of the final frontiers for growth in the Asia region. One such industry that has benefitted from the opening of the country is telecommunications. The mobile penetration rate at 4.8% in 2011 has increased significantly to 90% in 2016. Despite renewed optimism and development in the economy, one statistic remains disappointing. According to a report by Asian Development Bank (ADB), only 23% of the adult population have access to a bank account. This highlights a need to reach out and increase access to financial resources to a population that is severely unbanked and underbanked. This creates an interesting proposition of allowing both the telecommunications and financial sector to form the mobile financial services (MFS) sector and meet the need of improving access to financial resources for the population. This report explores the government role in supporting, growing and sustaining the MFS sector and conducts a comparative research into Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand to understand the steps taken by these governments to develop their own Financial Technology (FinTech), specifically MFS, industry. Finally, the report will present preliminary recommendations that the Myanmar government could consider implementing to drive growth in its MFS sector.

This paper investigates calculations of robust funding valuation adjustment (FVA) for over the counter (OTC) derivatives under distributional uncertainty using Wasserstein distance as the ambiguity measure. Wrong way funding risk can be characterized via the robust FVA formulation. The simpler dual formulation of the robust FVA optimization is derived. Next, some computational experiments are conducted to measure the additional FVA charge due to distributional uncertainty under a variety of portfolio and market configurations. Finally some suggestions for future work, such as robust capital valuation adjustment (KVA) and margin valuation adjustment (MVA), are discussed.

Recently (Assani et al. 2018) introduced the concept of the most productive scale size (MPSS) for multi-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) systems which are connected in series. However, some real-life applications may have different structures. This paper investigates the MPSS measurements for systems consisting of multiple subsystems connected in parallel. New models for determining the MPSS of the system and the subsystems are proposed. It is proved that the MPSS of the system can be decomposed as the weighted sum of MPSS of the individual subsystems. The main result is that the system is overall MPSS if and only if it is MPSS in each subsystem. MPSS decomposition allows policymakers to target the non-MPSS subsystems of the production process in order to the subsequent improvements. An application of China's Five-Year Plans (FYPs) is used to show the applicability of the proposed methods for estimating and decomposing MPSS in parallel network DEA. Industry and Agriculture sectors with shared inputs are considered as two subsystems in the FYPs. Interesting findings have been noticed. First, for an equal ratio of shared inputs (50 Industry: 50 Agriculture), the Industry sector achieved MPSS in 22 years compared to 17 years in Agriculture. In other words, using the same resources of population, GDP, and general government final consumption, the Industry sector is more stable and productive than the Agriculture sector. Second, the last two FYPs, 11th and 12th, were the perfect two FYPs among the others.

This paper offers new mathematical models to measure the most productive scale size (MPSS) of production systems with mixed structure networks (mixed of series and parallel). In the first property, we deal with a general multi-stage network which can be transformed, using dummy processes, into a series of parallel networks. In the second property, we consider a direct network combined with series and parallel structure. In this paper, we propose new models to measure the overall MPSS of the production systems and their internal processes. MPSS decomposition is discussed and examined. As a real-life application, this study measures the efficiency and MPSS of research and development (R&D) activities of Chinese provinces within an R&D value chain network. In the R&D value chain, profitability and marketability stages are connected in series, where the profitability stage is composed of operation and R&D efforts connected in parallel. The MPSS network model provides not only the MPSS measurement but also values that indicate the appropriate degree of intermediate measures for the two stages. Improvement strategy is given for each region based on the gap between the current and the appropriate level of intermediate measures. Our findings show that the marketability efficiency values of Chinese R&D regions were low, and no regions are operated under the MPSS. As a result, most Chinese regions performed inefficiently regarding both profitability and marketability. This finding provides initial evidence that the generally lower profitability and marketability efficiency of Chinese regions is a severe problem that may be due to wasted resources on production and R&D.

Hotelling's $T^2$-test for the mean of a multivariate normal distribution is one of the triumphs of classical multivariate analysis. It is uniformly most powerful among invariant tests, and admissible, proper Bayes, and locally and asymptotically minimax among all tests. Nonetheless, investigators often prefer non-invariant tests, especially those obtained by selecting only a small subset of variables from which the $T^2$-statistic is to be calculated, because such reduced statistics are more easily interpretable for their specific application. Thus it is relevant to ask the extent to which power is lost when variable selection is limited to very small subsets of variables, e.g. of size one (yielding univariate Student-$t^2$ tests) or size two (yielding bivariate $T^2$-tests). This study presents some evidence, admittedly fragmentary and incomplete, suggesting that in some cases no power may be lost over a wide range of alternatives.

In this paper, I empirically investigate how the openness of political institutions to diverse representation can impact conflict-related violence. By exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in the number of councillors in Colombian municipalities, I develop two sets of results. First, regression discontinuity estimates show that larger municipal councils have a considerably greater number of political parties with at least one elected representative. I interpret this result as evidence that larger municipal councils are more open to diverse political participation. The estimates also reveal that non-traditional parties are the main beneficiaries of this greater political openness. Second, regression discontinuity estimates show that political openness substantially decreases conflict-related violence, namely the killing of civilian non-combatants. By exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in local election results, I show that the lower level of political violence stems from greater participation by parties with close links to armed groups. Using data about the types of violence employed by these groups, and representation at higher levels of government, I argue that armed violence has decreased not because of power-sharing arrangements involving armed groups linked to the parties with more political representation, but rather because armed groups with less political power and visibility are deterred from initiating certain types of violence.

This article presents a stochastic framework to quantify the biometric risk of an insurance portfolio in solvency regimes such as Solvency II or the Swiss Solvency Test (SST). The main difficulty in this context constitutes in the proper representation of long term risks in the profit-loss distribution over a one year horizon. This will be resolved by using least-squares Monte Carlo methods to quantify the impact of new experience on the annual re-valuation of the portfolio. Therefore our stochastic model can be seen as an example for an internal model, as allowed under Solvency II or the SST. Since our model does not rely upon nested simulations it is computationally fast and easy to implement.

We obtain structural results for non-Markovian optimal stopping problems in discrete time when the decision maker is risk averse and has partial information about the stochastic sequences generating the costs. Time consistency is ensured in the problem by the aggregation of a sequence of conditional risk mappings, and the framework allows for model ambiguity. A reflected backward stochastic difference equation is used to characterise the value function and optimal stopping times.

Direct cash transfer programs have shown success as poverty interventions in both the developing and developed world, yet little research exists examining the society-wide outcomes of an unconditional cash transfer program disbursed without means-testing. This paper attempts to determine the impact of direct cash transfers on educational outcomes in a developed society by investigating the impacts of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, which was launched in 1982 and continues to be disbursed on an annual basis to every Alaskan. A synthetic control model is deployed to examine the path of educational attainment among Alaskans between 1977 and 1991 in order to determine if high school status completion rates after the launch of the dividend diverge from the synthetic in a manner suggestive of a treatment effect.

In the paper, the pricing of Quanto options is studied, where the underlying foreign asset and the exchange rate are correlated with each other. Firstly, we adopt Bayesian methods to estimate unknown parameters entering the pricing formula of Quanto options, including the volatility of stock, the volatility of exchange rate and the correlation. Secondly, we compute and predict prices of different four types of Quanto options based on Bayesian posterior prediction techniques and Monte Carlo methods. Finally, we provide numerical simulations to demonstrate the advantage of Bayesian method used in this paper comparing with some other existing methods. This paper is a new application of the Bayesian methods in the pricing of multi-asset options.