News: ICT-related News

Over the period 1995–2016, the Italian performance in terms of productivity was poor in historical terms and in comparison with its main international partners. This issue goes beyond Italy, with declining productivity growth observed, from the second half of the nineties, in several other advanced economies. Possible explanations for the slowdown include factors such as lower capital investment…

Credit scoring was introduced in India in 2007. We study the pace of its adoption by new private banks (NPBs) and state-owned or public sector banks (PSBs). NPBs adopt scoring quickly for all borrowers. PSBs adopt scoring quickly for new borrowers but not for existing borrowers. Instrumental Variable (IV) estimates and counterfactuals using scores available to but not used by PSBs indicate that…

Market intelligence FinTechs aggregate many data sources, including nontraditional ones, and synthesize such data using artificial intelligence to make investment recommendations. Using data from a market intelligence FinTech, we evaluate the relationship between the FinTech data coverage and market efficiency. We find an increase in price informativeness for stocks with higher FinTech coverage…

Innovative business models supported by digital technologies, together with the widening connectivity and data collection, are already giving a big contribution in fostering the access to electricity and clean cooking in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper gives an overview on the actual state of energy access in Sub-Saharan Africa and the current technologies used to provide it, followed by a…

We explore the idea that judgment by representativeness reflects the workings of episodic memory, especially interference. In a new laboratory experiment on cued recall, participants are shown two groups of images with different distributions of colors. We find that i) decreasing the frequency of a given color in one group significantly increases the recalled frequency of that color in the other…