FinTech Adoption and Household Risk-Taking

Abstract

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Chinese fintech companies and their “going out” strategies

“…This paper focuses on Chinese fintech companies' contributions to global financial digitization. It also connects the dots between Chinese fintech research and other more fertile well-researched areas in China studies, such as China's model of "digital authoritarianism" (Fanusie and Jin, 2021;Polyakova and Meserole, 2019;MacKinnon, 2011) and the Chinese government's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Yamada and Palma, 2018;Hong et al, 2020;Hillman et al, 2021). Furthermore, the paper contributes to a fast-growing field of research on CBDCs (Bordo and Levin, 2017;Mancini-Griffoli et al, 2018;Andolfatto, 2020;Auer et al, 2020;Niepelt, 2020;Rosa and Tentori, 2021;Qian, 2019) through an analysis of China's digital yuan, known as e-CNY (Chorzempa, 2021;Qian, 2019), and the latter's likely interactions with existing Chinese fintech platforms (Shenglin, 2020).…”

“…Research on fintech companies is a comparatively new area of academic inquiry given the relative nascence of the industry. Nonetheless, this paper contributes to a budding area of interest to academics and policymakers alike, as it considers the technological, macroeconomic, financial (Fat as, 2019;Frost et al, 2019;Hassan et al, 2019;Gambacarto et al, 2019;Hong et al, 2020;Zhang and Chen, 2019;Casey et al, 2018;Boot et al, 2020), monetary (Tucker, 2017;Petralia et al, 2019;Eichengreen, 2019;Kahn, 2016;Auer and B€ ohme, 2020;Armelius et al, 2021;Chaum et al, 2021), social (Saka et al, 2021;Chiou, 2020;Philippon, 2020) and even geopolitical effects of financial digitization (Ferguson, 2008(Ferguson, , 2018(Ferguson, , 2019Chorzempa, 2021). This paper focuses on Chinese fintech companies' contributions to global financial digitization.…”

Digital financial inclusion development, investment diversification, and household extreme portfolio risk

“…In addition, digital financial inclusion plays an important role in household investment behaviour. Using the Ant Group's unique account-level data on consumption, investment, and fintech usage, Hong et al (2020) investigate how fintech can lower investment barriers and help households move toward optimal risk-taking. They find that the fintech improvements went beyond the optimal alignment of risk-taking and consumption prescribed by Merton (1971).…”

Adoption of fintech services: role of saving and borrowing mechanisms

“…Most studies that investigate the drivers of fintech participation or adoption (Chuang et al, 2016;Hong et al, 2020;Hu et al, 2019;Jünger and Mietzner, 2020;Singh et al, 2020;Tun-Pin et al, 2019) base their analysis on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by Davis (1989). They either focus on the perceived usefulness of the technology and consumer comfort, or extend the TAM by including reliability, trust and perceived risk, which are crucial concerns related to digital banking activities.…”

“…They either focus on the perceived usefulness of the technology and consumer comfort, or extend the TAM by including reliability, trust and perceived risk, which are crucial concerns related to digital banking activities. Moreover, some studies highlight the importance of other driving factors in influencing the use of fintech services, such as financial literacy (Jünger and Mietzner, 2020), price value (Carlin et al, 2017;Senyo and Osabutey, 2020), tech-savviness and geographical location of users (Hong et al, 2020), brand image and government support (Hu et al, 2019), generation, gender and information (Carlin et al, 2017), distrust in banks (Saiedi et al, 2020), as well as intrinsic factors such as excitement and sensation-seeking behavior (Daskalakis and Yue, 2018). We note that the majority of these studies rely on responses to surveys directly collected from individuals or on customer data from online funding platforms.…”