Roberto Rigobon | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

The Limits of AI in Financial Services

AI is transforming industries, raising concerns about job displacement and decision making reliability. AI, as a universal approximation function, excels in data driven tasks but struggles with small datasets, subjective probabilities, and contexts requiring human judgment, relationships, and ethics.The EPOCH framework highlights five irreplaceable human capabilities: Empathy, Presence, Opinion, Creativity, and Hope. These attributes are vital in financial services for trust, inclusion, innovation, and consumer experience. Although AI improves efficiency in risk management and compliance, it will not eliminate jobs but redefine them, similar to how ATMs reshaped bank tellers' roles. The challenge is ensuring professionals adapt, leveraging AI's strengths while preserving essential human capabilities.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2012

In Search of the Black Swan: Analysis of the Statistical Evidence of Electoral Fraud in Venezuela

This study analyzes diverse hypotheses of electronic fraud in the Recall Referendum celebrated in Venezuela on August 15, 2004. We define fraud as the difference between the elector's intent, and the official vote tally. Our null hypothesis is that there was no fraud, and we attempt to search for evidence that will allow us to reject this hypothesis. We find no evidence that fraud was committed by applying numerical maximums to machines in some precincts. Equally, we discard any hypothesis that implies altering some machines and not others, at each electoral precinct, because the variation patterns between machines at each precinct are normal. However, the statistical evidence is compatible with the occurrence of fraud that has affected every machine in a single precinct, but differentially more in some precincts than others. We find that the deviation pattern between precincts, based on the relationship between the signatures collected to request the referendum in November 2003 (the so-called, Reafirmazo), and the YES votes on August 15, is positive and significantly correlated with the deviation pattern in the relationship between exit polls and votes in those same precincts. In other words, those precincts in which, according to the number of signatures, there are an unusually low number of YES votes (i.e., votes to impeach the president), is also where, according to the exit polls, the same thing occurs.

stat.ME↗