Finance Webinar（2023- 01）
Topic : Cashless Payment and Financial Inclusion
Speaker: Shumiao Ouyang, Princeton University
Time: Friday, January 6, 10:00 - 11: 30, a.m. Beijing Time
Location: Zoom Online Conference Room
Abstract
Can in-person cashless payment improve credit provision to the underprivileged? I study Alipay, a BigTech platform that acts as a one-stop-shop for financial services for more than 1 billion users. Using a representative sample of Alipay users with detailed information on their consumption, credit, and investment activities, I exploit a natural experiment to estimate the effects of cashless payment adoption. The use of cashless payment in a month increases the likelihood of gaining access to credit in the same month by 56.3%. Conditional on having credit access, a 1% increase in the cashless payment flow leads to a 0.41% increase in the credit line. These effects are mainly present for the less educated and the older. To quantify the value of cashless payment data to the lender and consumers, I build and estimate a simple model and run a counterfactual in which the lender does not observe these data. I find that credit lines rise by 57.7% on average, consumer surplus rises by 0.5% of median disposable income, and the increase in lender profit is about 41.3% of the increase in consumer surplus.
Biography
Shumiao Ouyang is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics, at the Department of Economics and Bendheim Center for Finance, Princeton University. He has been a dissertation fellow at Luohan Academy since 2018. His research interests center on FinTech, Household Finance, Digital Economy, and Financial Intermediation.
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