Search Results (4)

Cities are looking for an approach to affordable, integrated and sustainable transport systems across all transport modes and services. Automated vehicle (AV) technologies use emerging technologies to integrate multimodal transport systems and ensure sustainable mobility in a city. Vehicle automation has entered the public conscious with several auto companies leading recent developments in legislation and affordable cars. Governments support AVs through policies and legal frameworks, and it is the responsibility of AV dealers to comply with legal and policy provisions so that the benefits of this new and promising industry can be felt. Despite the growing interest in AVs as a potential solution for sustainable transportation, several research gaps remain in relation to technology and infrastructure readiness, policy and regulation, equity and accessibility concerns, public acceptance and behaviour, and integration with public transport. This paper discusses the challenges and dilemmas of adopting AVs within the existing urban transportation system and within existing design standards in the United Kingdom and explores the progress and opportunities related to policies of transportation that may stem from the emergence of AV technologies in the UK. The potential of AVs is still limited by cyber insecurity, incompetent infrastructure, social acceptance, and public awareness. However, AVs are crucial to a city’s efficiency and prosperity and will become essential components for the provision of more flexible, convenient, integrated and sustainable travel options. Full article

In Canada, financial advisors and dealers are required by provincial securities commissions and self-regulatory organizations—charged with direct regulation over investment dealers and mutual fund dealers—to respectively collect and maintain know your client (KYC) information, such as their age or risk tolerance, for investor accounts. With this information, investors, under their advisor’s guidance, make decisions on their investments that are presumed to be beneficial to their investment goals. Our unique dataset is provided by a financial investment dealer with over 50,000 accounts for over 23,000 clients covering the period from January 1st to August 12th 2019. We use a modified behavioral finance recency, frequency, monetary model for engineering features that quantify investor behaviours, and unsupervised machine learning clustering algorithms to find groups of investors that behave similarly. We show that the KYC information—such as gender, residence region, and marital status—does not explain client behaviours, whereas eight variables for trade and transaction frequency and volume are most informative. Hence, our results should encourage financial regulators and advisors to use more advanced metrics to better understand and predict investor behaviours. Full article

The global internet antiquities market exists in a complex cultural heritage framework, comprised of international law and domestic legislation. In this paper, the questions I seek to answer are the following: how do internet antiquities dealers engage with their legal obligations, and how is this engagement translated to the ethics of their businesses? This paper presents a comparative examination of 45 antiquities dealers split across three categories—internet dealers, eBay dealers and social media dealers—revealing three key insights about the internet antiquities market: firstly, that the level of legal literacy in the market is depicted as being quite poor; secondly, that the performance of legal awareness does not always correspond with ethical dealer practices; and finally, some dealers utilise a suite of justifications for their behaviours, practices and values (known as neutralisation techniques) to undermine their legal obligations. Such results confirm existing claims of the failure of self-regulation in the internet antiquities market and reveal a demand for educational campaigns targeted at raising consumer awareness by challenging misleading market narratives and highlighting the ethical and legal issues involved with the trade of cultural heritage. Full article

This paper contributes to the debate concerning the benefits and disadvantages of introducing a European Sovereign Bond-Backed Securitisation (SBBS) to address the need for a common safe asset that would break destabilising bank-sovereign linkages. The analysis focuses on assessing the effectiveness of hedges incurred while making markets in individual euro area sovereign bonds by taking offsetting positions in one or more of the SBBS tranches. Tranche yields are estimated using a simulation approach. This involves the generation of sovereign defaults and allocation of the combined credit risk premium of all the sovereigns, at the end of each day, to the SBBS tranches according to the seniority of claims under the proposed securitisation. Optimal hedging with SBBS is found to reduce risk exposures substantially in normal market conditions. In volatile conditions, hedging is not very effective but leaves dealers exposed to mostly idiosyncratic risks. These remaining risks largely disappear if dealers are diversified in providing liquidity across country-specific secondary markets and SBBS tranches. Hedging each of the long positions in a portfolio of individual sovereigns results in a risk exposure as low as that borne by holding the safest individual sovereign bond (the Bund). Full article