Starting in the 1990s, US bank assets grew more concentrated among a few large institutions. We explore the changing role of idiosyncratic volatility as a shaping force of the bank asset power law distribution. Our results reveal that idiosyncratic asset volatilities for bank-holding companies declined since the 1990s. To the extent that firm-specific shocks can have significant macroeconomic consequences, this result implies that even as one obvious source of aggregate risk and...

We present results from a "corruption game" (a dictator game modified so that recipients can take a side payment in exchange for accepting a reduction in the overall size of the pie). Dictators (silently) treated to be able to take more of the recipient's tokens, took more of them. They were also more likely to believe that recipients had accepted side payments, even if there was a prize for accuracy. The results favor the hypothesis that people avoid altruistic actions by distorting beliefs...

We investigate whether racial discrimination in the form of biased assessment of students is prevalent within Brazilian schools. Evidence is drawn from unique administrative data pertaining to eighth-grade students and educators. Holding constant performance in blindly-scored tests of proficiency and behavioral traits we find that blacks have lower teacher-assigned math grades than their white classmates. Heterogeneity in differentials provides evidence both of robustness with respect to...

For some entities, the utility-maximizing evasion rate depends substantially on tax audit features, such as audit probabilities and penalty rates. Bergolo et al. (2017) document large misperceptions about these features. In this paper, we expand the analysis of survey data to explore potential sources of these misperceptions. Of all the channels that we explore, recent contact with audits best explains differences in misperceptions.

We present results from a "corruption game" (a dictator game modified so that recipients can take a side payment in exchange for accepting a reduction in the overall size of the pie). Dictators (silently) treated to be able to take more of the recipient's tokens, took more of them. They were also more likely to believe that recipients had accepted side payments, even if there was a prize for accuracy. The results favor the hypothesis that people avoid altruistic actions by distorting beliefs...

We investigate whether racial discrimination in the form of biased assessment of students is prevalent within Brazilian schools. Evidence is drawn from unique administrative data pertaining to eighth-grade students and educators. Holding constant performance in blindly-scored tests of proficiency and behavioral traits we find that blacks have lower teacher-assigned math grades than their white classmates. Heterogeneity in differentials provides evidence both of robustness with respect to...

For some entities, the utility-maximizing evasion rate depends substantially on tax audit features, such as audit probabilities and penalty rates. Bergolo et al. (2017) document large misperceptions about these features. In this paper, we expand the analysis of survey data to explore potential sources of these misperceptions. Of all the channels that we explore, recent contact with audits best explains differences in misperceptions.

This paper uses a dynamic factor model for the quarterly changes in consumption goods' prices in the United States since 1959 to separate them into three independent components: idiosyncratic relative-price changes, a low-dimensional index of aggregate relative-price changes, and an index of equiproportional changes in all inflation rates that we label "pure" inflation. We use the estimates to answer two questions. First, what share of the variability of inflation is associated with each...

The sustained rise in US current account deficits, the stubborn decline in long-run real rates, and the rise in US assets in global portfolios appear as anomalies from the perspective of conventional models. This paper rationalizes these facts as an equilibrium outcome when different regions of the world differ in their capacity to generate financial assets from real investments. Extensions of the basic model generate exchange rate and foreign direct investment excess returns broadly...

Large Japanese banks often engaged in sham loan restructurings that kept credit flowing to otherwise insolvent borrowers (which we call zombies). We examine the implications of suppressing the normal competitive process whereby the zombies would shed workers and lose market share. The congestion created by the zombies reduces the profits for healthy firms, which discourages their entry and investment. We confirm that zombie-dominated industries exhibit more depressed job creation and...

We investigate the role of information technology (IT) in the collection of delinquent consumer debt. We argue that the widespread adoption of IT by the debt collection industry in the 1990s contributed to the observed expansion of unsecured risky lending such as credit cards. Our model stresses the importance of delinquency and private information about borrower solvency. The prevalence of delinquency implies that the costs of debt collection must be borne by lenders to sustain incentives...

In Caballero and Simsek (2017), we develop a model of fickle capital flows and show that, when countries are similar, international flows create global liquidity and mitigate crises despite their fickleness. In this paper, we focus on the asymmetric situation of Emerging Markets (EM) exchanging flows with Developed Markets (DM) that feature lower returns but less frequent crises. Relatively high DM returns help to mitigate EM crises by reducing fickle inflows and by providing greater...

The sensitivity of US aggregate investment to shocks is procyclical. The response upon impact increases by approximately 50 percent from the trough to the peak of the business cycle. This feature of the data follows naturally from a DSGE model with lumpy microeconomic capital adjustment. Beyond explaining this specific time variation, our model and evidence provide a counterexample to the claim that microeconomic investment lumpiness is inconsequential for macroeconomic analysis.

In Caballero and Simsek (2017), we develop a model of fickle capital flows and show that, when countries are similar, international flows create global liquidity and mitigate crises despite their fickleness. In this paper, we focus on the asymmetric situation of Emerging Markets (EM) exchanging flows with Developed Markets (DM) that feature lower returns but less frequent crises. Relatively high DM returns help to mitigate EM crises by reducing fickle inflows and by providing greater...

We investigate the role of information technology (IT) in the collection of delinquent consumer debt. We argue that the widespread adoption of IT by the debt collection industry in the 1990s contributed to the observed expansion of unsecured risky lending such as credit cards. Our model stresses the importance of delinquency and private information about borrower solvency. The prevalence of delinquency implies that the costs of debt collection must be borne by lenders to sustain incentives...

Starting in the 1990s, US bank assets grew more concentrated among a few large institutions. We explore the changing role of idiosyncratic volatility as a shaping force of the bank asset power law distribution. Our results reveal that idiosyncratic asset volatilities for bank-holding companies declined since the 1990s. To the extent that firm-specific shocks can have significant macroeconomic consequences, this result implies that even as one obvious source of aggregate risk and...

The sensitivity of US aggregate investment to shocks is procyclical. The response upon impact increases by approximately 50 percent from the trough to the peak of the business cycle. This feature of the data follows naturally from a DSGE model with lumpy microeconomic capital adjustment. Beyond explaining this specific time variation, our model and evidence provide a counterexample to the claim that microeconomic investment lumpiness is inconsequential for macroeconomic analysis.

This paper uses a dynamic factor model for the quarterly changes in consumption goods' prices in the United States since 1959 to separate them into three independent components: idiosyncratic relative-price changes, a low-dimensional index of aggregate relative-price changes, and an index of equiproportional changes in all inflation rates that we label "pure" inflation. We use the estimates to answer two questions. First, what share of the variability of inflation is associated with each...

<pre><strong>WD50K dataset: An hyper-relational dataset derived from Wikidata statements</strong>. The is constructed by the following procedure based on [Wikidata RDF dump](https://dumps.wikimedia.org/wikidatawiki/20190801/) of August 2019: - A set seed nodes corresponding to entities FB15K-237 having a direct mapping in (<strong>P646</strong> "Freebase ID") extracted dump. For each node, all statements whose <strong>main</strong> object and <strong>qualifier</strong> values...

<pre><strong>WD50K dataset: An hyper-relational dataset derived from Wikidata statements</strong>. The is constructed by the following procedure based on [Wikidata RDF dump](https://dumps.wikimedia.org/wikidatawiki/20190801/) of August 2019: - A set seed nodes corresponding to entities FB15K-237 having a direct mapping in (<strong>P646</strong> "Freebase ID") extracted dump. For each node, all statements whose <strong>main</strong> object and <strong>qualifier</strong> values...

In the face of continuously changing contextual conditions and ubiquitous disruptive crisis events, the concept of resilience refers to some of the most urgent, challenging, and interesting issues of nowadays society. Economic value networks, technical infrastructures, health systems, and social textures alike need to unfold capacities to withstand, adapt, recover, or even refine and transform themselves to stay ahead of changes.

Dialogue systems for interaction with humans have been enjoying increased popularity in the research and industry fields. To this day, the best way to estimate their success is through means of human evaluation and not automated approaches, despite the abundance of work done in the field. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of perceiving dialogue evaluation as an anomaly detection task. The paper looks into four dialogue modeling approaches and how their objective functions...

The past years have seen a growing amount of research on question answering (QA) over Semantic Web data, shaping an interaction paradigm that allows end users to profit from the expressive power of Semantic Web standards while, at the same time, hiding their complexity behind an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. On the other hand, the growing amount of data has led to a heterogeneous data landscape where QA systems struggle to keep up with the volume, variety and veracity of the...

With regard to the wider area of AI/LT platform interoperability, we concentrate on two core aspects: (1) cross-platform search and discovery of resources and services; (2) composition of cross-platform service workflows. We devise five different levels (of increasing complexity) of platform interoperability that we suggest to implement in a wider federation of AI/LT platforms. We illustrate the approach using the five emerging AI/LT platforms AI4EU, ELG, Lynx, QURATOR and SPEAKER.

The automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogues remains a largely unsolved challenge. Despite the abundance of work done in the field, human judges have to evaluate dialogues quality. As a consequence, performing such evaluations at scale is usually expensive. This work investigates using a deep-learning model trained on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark to serve as a quality indication of open-domain dialogues. The aim is to use the various GLUE tasks as...

Billions of facts pertaining to a multitude of domains are now availableon the Web as RDF data. However, accessing this data is stilla difficult endeavour for non-expert users. In order to melioratethe access to this data, approaches imposing minimal hurdles totheir users are required. Although many question answering systemsover Linked Data have being proposed, retrieving the desireddata is still significantly challenging. In addition, developing andevaluating question answering systems...

As chatbots are gaining popularity for simplifying access to information and community interaction, it is essential to examine whether these agents are serving their intended purpose and catering to the needs of their users. Therefore, we present an approach to perform an ex-post-facto analysis over the logs of knowledge base-driven dialogue systems. Using the DBpedia Chatbot as our case study, we inspect three aspects of the interactions, (i) user queries and feedback, (ii) the bot's...

Over the last decades, several billion Web pages have been made available on the Web. The ongoing transition from the current Web of unstructured data to the Data Web yet requires scalable and accurate approaches for the extraction of structured data in RDF (Resource Description Framework) from these websites. One of the key steps towards extracting RDF from text is the disambiguation of named entities. We address this issue by presenting AGDISTIS, a novel knowledge-base-agnostic approach...

Question Answering over Linked Data provides concise information to the user from a natural language request instead of ooding them with documents. However, the accessibility of Linked Data resources, e.g., SPARQL endpoints, is bound to an online connection. We present OQA, the first offline Question Answering system over Linked Data for mobile devices. We built OQA with the limited resources of an Android mobile device, such as battery power, computational power, or memory consumption in...

Statistical data in the form of RDF Data Cubes is becoming increasingly valuable as it influences decisions in areas such as health care, policy and finance. While a growing amount is becoming freely available through the open data movement, this data is opaque to laypersons. Semantic Question Answering (SQA) technologies provide intuitive access via free-form natural language queries but general SQA systems cannot process RDF Data Cubes. On the intersection between RDF Data Cubes and SQA,...

The QALD-8 challenge focused on the successful and long running multilingual QA task. For the first time, the participating teams were required to provide webservices of their systems to participate in the challenge, which will in turn support comparable research in the future. In this challenge, we also changed the underlying evaluation platform to account for the need for comparable experiments via webservices in contrast to former XML/JSON file submissions. This increased the entrance...

Most question answering (QA) systems over Linked Data, i.e. Knowledge Graphs, approach the question answering task as a conversion from a natural language question to its corresponding SPARQL query. A common approach is to use query templates to generate SPARQL queries with slots that need to be filled. Using templates instead of running an extensive NLP pipeline or end-to-end model shifts the QA problem into a classification task, where the system needs to match the input question to the...

Question answering (QA) systems, which source answers to natural language questions from Semantic Web data, have recently shifted from the research realm to become commercially viable products. Increasing investments have refined an interaction paradigm that allows end users to profit from the expressive power of Semantic Web standards, while at the same time hiding their complexity behind intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces. Not surprisingly, after the first excitement we did not witness a...