Cashless payment and financial inclusion

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ouyang, Shumiao
• 署名单位: University of Oxford; University of Oxford
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-405X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2026.104277
• 发表日期: 2026-06
• 页码: 104277
• 关键词: Cashless payment; BigTech; Consumer credit; Financial inclusion; technology adoption; credit; COSTS

摘要

This paper investigates how cashless payment affects credit access for underserved populations using data from Alipay, a leading Chinese BigTech platform with over 1 billion users that offers a wide range of financial services. By exploiting the staggered rollout of Alipay-bundled shared bikes across cities as a natural experiment and analyzing a representative Alipay user sample, I find that cashless payment adoption increases credit access by 56.3% and that a 1% rise in payment flow increases credit lines by 0.41%. These effects are stronger for less educated and older individuals, who have traditionally faced greater barriers to accessing financial services.