Despite the commitments of the development community toward broader access to finance, financial inclusion rates worldwide are rather unsatisfactory. To date, around two billion adults do not have access to basic financial services such as savings and checking accounts. Attempting to bridge such...

State-owned financial institutions fall into three main groups: commercial banks, hybrid banks, and development institutions. The larger state-owned commercial banks/ groups include Sberbank, the VTB Bank group, and Gazprombank. Like private commercial banks, these institutions do not have a...

The report aims to explore and analyze the major gaps in financial inclusion and access to finance in Romania, as identified in the Technical Note on Financial Intermediation prepared in the context of the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) (2018). The FSAP technical note analyzed the...

Good corporate governance ensures that companies use their resources more efficiently, protects minority shareholders, leads to better decision making, and improves relations with workers, creditors, and other stakeholders. It is an important prerequisite for attracting the patient capital...

Many households in developing countries lack formal financial histories, making it difficult for firms to extend credit, and for potential borrowers to receive it. However, many of these households have mobile phones, which generate rich data about behavior. This article shows that behavioral...

This paper presents different deep neural network architectures designed to forecast the distribution of returns on a portfolio of U.S. Treasury securities. A long short-term memory model and a convolutional neural network are tested as the main building blocks of each architecture. The models...

This paper proposes a set of new methods to estimate inequality of opportunity based on conditional inference regression trees. It illustrates how these methods represent a substantial improvement over existing empirical approaches to measure inequality of opportunity. First, the new methods...

To overcome the constraints for policy and practice posed by limited availability of data on crop rotation, this paper applies machine learning to freely available satellite imagery to identify the rotational practices of more than 7,000 villages in Ukraine. Rotation effects estimated based on...

With all the recent attention focused on big data, it is easy to overlook that basic vital statistics remain difficult to obtain in most of the world. This project set out to test whether an openly available dataset (Twitter) could be transformed into a resource for urban planning and...