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on Information and Communication Technologies |
| By: | Amrita Chatterjee (Assistant Professor, Madras School of Economics); Simontini Das (Assistant Professor, Jadavpur University, Kolkata: 700032) |
| Abstract: | Financial Inclusion has its primary objective in providing access to useful and affordable financial products and services that meet the needs of so far unbanked population for transactions, payments, savings, credit and insurance in a responsible and sustainable way. The penetration of banking services in India has made reasonable progress though there are still regional disparities with especially the rural and female population lagging behind. However, not only access but also usage of financial services matters. Moreover, as there is a strong initiative towards digitalized cashless economy in India, it is important to examine whether the country is ready for a more technology-driven financial system. As far as the diffusion of telecommunication technology is concerned, India has made a remarkable progress in urban areas giving rise to significant digital divide between rural and urban India. With spread of mobile and mobile internet though, this divide has come down to some extent. Thus if this inclination towards mobile technology can be properly channelized to improve the access as well as usage of financial services through spread of mobile banking then more and more people can be brought under the purview of institutional credit system leading to reduction in poverty and inequality. The current paper intends to study the role of information and communication technology (ICT) diffusion in improving the status of financial inclusion across the different states of India. Two separate indices for Financial Inclusion and Information Technology Diffusion are formed and the states are clustered to club the states similar in terms of their performance. Then the paper tries to test whether ICT diffusion is one of the indicators of Financial Inclusion in India. The dynamic panel data analysis helped us to identify the role of technology as well as other socio-economic factors which can contribute in interstate disparities in FI. The results show that technology does play an important role in improving financial inclusion. As the elderly people in rural as well as urban areas are still not that familiar with mobile and internet, they may not be able to get benefited by ICT revolution. But lack of education and more importantly poor status of financial literacy play a very vital role in FI |
| Keywords: | Financial Inclusion, Information and Communication Technology Diffusion, Dynamic Panel Data Model |
| JEL: | L86 L96 C23 G21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mad:wpaper:2019-178&r=all |
| By: | Fest, Sebastian; Kvaloy, Ola; Nieken, Petra; Schöttner, Anja |
| Abstract: | An increasing number of workers participate in online labor markets. In contrast to traditional employment relationships within firms, the interaction between online workers and their employers are short and impersonal, which makes motivating online workers more challenging. We present results from two large-scale real-effort experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk investigating the effects of monetary and non-monetary motivational instruments. In the first experiment, we study the effects of performance pay and simple upfront messages (praise or reference points) on performance. The second experiment concentrates on the effects of communication techniques used by charismatic leaders. Performance pay increases output significantly. Sending simple messages, however, can have a significantly negative effect on output. The results from the second experiment show that charismatic communication techniques can also backfire when only a subset of them is used, whereas using a broad set including quantitative goals increases output significantly. Neither intervention had any effect on the quality of work. |
| Keywords: | Online Labor Market,Performance Pay,Motivation,Charismatic Leadership |
| JEL: | C93 M52 J33 |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:vfsc20:224586&r=all |
| By: | Jean-François Brun (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - Clermont Auvergne - UCA - Université Clermont Auvergne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Gérard Chambas (FERDI - Fondation pour les Etudes et Recherches sur le Développement International); Jules Tapsoba; Abdoul-Akim Wandaogo (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - Clermont Auvergne - UCA - Université Clermont Auvergne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the effect of ICT readiness and ICT usage on tax revenue mobilization in developing countries. The paper uses a panel fixed effect methodology on a sample of 96 developing countries from 2005 to 2016. We provide evidences that although ICT readiness affects positively tax revenue, the effect is not significant. However, overall ICT usage increase tax revenue. This positive and significant effect remains valid for various taxes: direct taxes and VAT notably. In addition, business, government and individual use of ICTs each have a greater effect on tax revenues than global ICT usage. Regarding the transmission channels, we find that the effect passes through the control of corruption, government effectiveness and tax compliance. Finally, taking into account the time dimension of the study, the positive effect is observed over the second half of the period under study rather than during the first. |
| Keywords: | ICTs,Tax revenues,Panel data,Developing countries |
| Date: | 2020–10–27 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-02979897&r=all |
| By: | Bart van Ark; Klaas de Vries; Abdul Erumban |
| Abstract: | Over the past 15 years productivity growth in advanced economies has significantly slowed, giving rise to the productivity paradox of the New Digital Economy – that is, the notion of increased business spending on ICT assets and digital services without a noticeable increase in productivity. We argue that time lags are the most important reason for the slow emergence of the productivity effects from digital transformation. This paper provides evidence that underneath the slowing productivity growth rates at the macro level, signs of structural improvements can be detected. In the US most of the positive contribution to productivity growth is coming from the digital producing sector. The Euro Area and the UK show larger productivity contributions from the most intensive digital-using sectors, although the UK also had a fairly large number of less intensive digital-using industries which showed productivity declines. We also find that increases in innovation competencies of the workforce are concentrated in industries showing faster growth in labour productivity, even though more research is needed to identify causality. Finally, we speculate that as the recovery from the COVID-19 recession gets underway the potential for significant productivity gains in the medium term is larger than during the past fifteen years. |
| Keywords: | Production, Cost, Capital, Multifactor and Total Factor Productivity, Capacity, Measurement of Economic Growth, Aggregate Productivity |
| JEL: | D24 O47 |
| Date: | 2020–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nsr:niesrd:518&r=all |
| By: | Gries, Thomas; Naude, Wim |
| Abstract: | The economic impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is studied using a (semi) endogenous growth model with two novel features. First, the task approach from labor economics is reformulated and integrated into a growth model. Second, the standard represen- tative household assumption is rejected, so that aggregate demand restrictions can be introduced. With these novel features it is shown that (i) AI automation can decrease the share of labor income no matter the size of the elasticity of substitution between AI and labor, and (ii) when this elasticity is high, AI will unambiguously reduce aggre- gate demand and slow down GDP growth, even in the face of the positive technology shock that AI entails. If the elasticity of substitution is low, then GDP, productivity and wage growth may however still slow down, because the economy will then fail to benefit from the supply-side driven capacity expansion potential that AI can deliver. The model can thus explain why advanced countries tend to experience, despite much AI hype, the simultaneous existence of rather high employment with stagnating wages, productivity, and GDP. |
| Keywords: | Technology,artificial intelligence,productivity,labor demand,income distribution,growth theory |
| JEL: | O47 O33 J24 E21 E25 |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:vfsc20:224623&r=all |
| By: | Jerbashian Vahagn (Universitat de Barcelona, BEAT, and CERGE-EIEAT) |
| Abstract: | I use data from the World Input-Output Database and show that trade in information technologies (IT) has a significant contribution to the growth in foreign intermediate goods in 2001-2014 period. China has become one of the major foreign suppliers of IT and has strongly contributed to the rise in trade in IT. The growth in IT imports from China is associated with lower IT prices in sample European countries. The fall in IT prices has increased the demand for high wage occupations and reduced the demand for low wage occupations. From 20 to 95 percent of the variation in the demand for occupations stemming from the fall in IT prices can be attributed to the trade with China. |
| Keywords: | Trade, Information Technologies, China, Occupation Demand. |
| JEL: | F16 J23 J24 O33 L63 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ewp:wpaper:393web&r=all |
| By: | David Kohns; Arnab Bhattacharjee |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the added benefit of internet search data in the form of Google Trends for nowcasting real U.S. GDP growth in real time through the lens of the mixed frequency augmented Bayesian Structural Time Series model (BSTS) of Scott and Varian (2014). We show that a large dimensional set of search terms are able to improve nowcasts before other macro data becomes available early on the quarter. Search terms with high inclusion probability have negative correlation with GDP growth, which we reason to stem from them signalling special attention likely due to expected large troughs. We further offer several improvements on the priors: we allow to shrink state variances to zero to avoid overfitting states, extend the SSVS prior to the more flexible normal-inverse-gamma prior of Ishwaran et al. (2005) which stays agnostic about the underlying model size, as well as adapt the horseshoe prior of Carvalho et al. (2010) to the BSTS. The application to nowcasting GDP growth as well as a simulation study show that the horseshoe prior BSTS improves markedly over the SSVS and the original BSTS model, with largest gains to be expected in dense data-generating-processes. |
| Date: | 2020–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2011.00938&r=all |
| By: | Eric Danan (THEMA - Théorie économique, modélisation et applications - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - CY - CY Cergy Paris Université); Thibault Gajdos (LPC - Laboratoire de psychologie cognitive - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - AMU - Aix Marseille Université); Jean-Marc Tallon (PSE - Paris School of Economics, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement) |
| Abstract: | Many popular internet platforms use so-called collaborative filtering systems to give personalized recommendations to their users, based on other users who provided similar ratings for some items. We propose a novel approach to such recommendation systems by viewing a recommendation as a way to extend an agent's expressed preferences, which are typically incomplete, through some aggregate of other agents' expressed preferences. These extension and aggregation requirements are expressed by an Acceptance and a Pareto principle, respectively. We characterize the recommendation systems satisfying these two principles and contrast them with collaborative filtering systems, which typically violate the Pareto principle. |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02973924&r=all |
| By: | Douglas Almond; Xinming Du; Alana Vogel |
| Abstract: | While international election interference is not new, Russia is credited with “industrializing” trolling on English-language social media platforms. In October 2018, Twitter retrospectively identified 2.9 million English-language tweets as covertly written by trolls from Russia's Internet Research Agency. Most active 2015-2017, these Russian trolls generally supported the Trump campaign (Senate Intelligence Committee, 2019) and researchers have traced how this content disseminated across Twitter. Here, we take a different tack and seek exogenous drivers of Russian troll activity. We find that trolling fell 35% on Russian holidays and to a lesser extent, when temperatures were cold in St. Petersburg. More recent trolls released by Twitter do not show any systematic relationship to holidays and temperature, although substantially fewer of these that have been made public to date. Our finding for the pre-2018 interference period may furnish a natural experiment for evaluating the causal effect of Russian trolling on indirectly-affected outcomes and political behaviors — outcomes that are less traceable to troll content and potentially more important to policymakers than the direct dissemination activities previously studied. As a case in point, we describe suggestive evidence that Russian holidays impacted daily trading prices in 2016 election betting markets. |
| JEL: | H56 J22 J58 |
| Date: | 2020–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28035&r=all |
| By: | Susanto, Stefanny Magdalena |
| Abstract: | Strategic Orientation berpengaruh secara langsung terhadap firm performance suatu perusahaan. Teknologi Informasi menawarkan cara baru untuk menjangkau pelanggan dengan informasi pasar yang substansial. Dengan memanfaatkan Information Technology (IT), Perusahaan mendapatkan keuntungan dari pengaruh sosial terhadap pemasaran secara langsung, yang bertujuan untuk mengumpulkan informasi di jejaring sosial pelanggan. |
| Date: | 2020–10–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:uwstz&r=all |