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Various works have already showed that common shocks and cross-country financial linkages caused the banking systems of several countries to be highly interconnected with the result that during bad times, banking crises may arise simultaneously in different countries. Our aim is to provide further evidence on the topic using a dataset made by dichotomous banking crises time series for 66 countries from 1800 to 2014. Via the use of heatmap matrices we show that several countries exhibit pairwise correlation, which means that banking crises tend to occur in the same year. Clustering analysis suggests that developed countries (for the most European ones) are highly similar in terms of the path of events. An analysis of the events that followed the Great Depression and the Great Recession shows that after the crisis of 2008, banking crises tend to characterize countries tied by financial links whereas before 2008 contagion seems to affect countries in the same geographical area. Clustering analysis shows also that after financial liberalization, crises affected countries with similar economic structures and growth. Further researches should enlighten the origin of these linkages investigating how the process of contagion eventually happens., Comment: 14 pages, 2 tables, 7 figures

'Fake news' is information that generally spreads on the web, which only mimics the form of reliable news media content. The phenomenon has assumed uncontrolled proportions in recent years rising the concern of authorities and citizens. In this paper we present a classifier able to distinguish a reliable source from a fake news website. We have prepared a dataset made of 200 fake news websites and 200 reliable websites from all over the world and used as predictors information potentially available on websites, such as the presence of a 'contact us' section or a secured connection. The algorithm is based on logistic regression, whereas further analyses were carried out using tetrachoric correlation coefficients for dichotomous variables and chi-square tests. This framework offers a concrete solution to attribute a 'reliability score' to news website, defined as the probability that a source is reliable or not, and on this probability a user can decide if the news is worth sharing or not., Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables

Before the massive spread of computer technology, information was far from complex. The development of technology shifted the paradigm: from individuals who faced scarce and costly information to individuals who face massive amounts of information accessible at low costs. Nowadays we are living in the era of big data and investors deal every day with a huge flow of information. In the spirit of the modern idea that economic agents have limited computational capacity, we propose an original model using information overload to show how too much information could cause financial markets to depart from the traditional assumption of informational efficiency. We show that when information tends to infinite, the efficient market hypothesis ceases to be true. This happens also for lower levels of information, when the use of the maximum amount of information is not optimal for investors. The present work can be a stimulus to consider more realistic economic models and it can be further deepened including other realistic features present in financial markets, such as information asymmetry or noise in the transmission of information., Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures

The efficient market hypothesis has been considered one of the most controversial arguments in finance, with the academia divided between who claims the impossibility of beating the market and who believes that it is possible to gain over the average profits. If the hypothesis holds, it means, as suggested by Burton Malkiel, that a blindfolded monkey selecting stocks by throwing darts at a newspaper's financial pages could perform as well as a financial analyst, or even better. In this paper we use a novel approach, based on confidence intervals for proportions, to assess the degree of inefficiency in the S&P 500 Index components concluding that several stocks are inefficient: we estimated the proportion of inefficient stocks in the index to be between 12.13% and 27.87%. This supports other studies proving that a financial analyst, probably, is a better investor than a blindfolded monkey.