【主讲人】欧阳书淼
【主持人】高明 副教授
【报告题目】Cashless Payment and Financial Inclusion

【报告摘要】This paper evaluates the impact of mobile cashless payment on credit provision to the underprivileged. Using a representative sample of Alipay users that contains detailed information about their consumption, credit, and investment activities, I exploit a natural experiment to identify the real effects of cashless payment adoption. In this natural experiment, the staggered placement of Alipay-bundled shared bikes across different Chinese cities brings exogenous variations to the payment flow. I find that the use of in-person payment in a month increases the likelihood of getting access to credit in the same month by 56.3%. Conditional on having credit access, a 1% increase in the in-person payment flow leads to a 0.41% increase in the credit line. Those having higher in-person payment flow also use their credit lines more. Importantly, the positive effect of in-person payment flow on credit provision mainly exists for the less educated and the older, suggesting that cashless payment particularly benefits those who are traditionally underserved.

【主讲人介绍】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. His current research studies the effects of cashless payment adoption on financial inclusion and credit provision, the connection between data privacy and digital demand, and the rise of BigTech companies. He received his M.A. in finance from Guanghua School of Management, Peking University in 2015, and B.S. in life sciences and economics from Tsinghua University in 2013.