Summary:
Alibaba reported that on May 4, 2018, there were 870 million global active users of its Alipay application. During the 2018 Spring Festival, the number of WeChat monthly active accounts exceeded one billion. With the development of modern mobile technology and the popularization of mobile devices, mobile payments have rapidly replaced internet payments and become the backbone of third-party transactions. In China, electronic payments have brought great changes to people’s lives, especially mobile payment tools, such as Alipay and WeChat payment. These new payment tools, which combine liquidity and profitability, have caused a shock to the traditional payment methods. Moreover, the financial management tools provided by these applications have given households more money management options, and to some extent have replaced savings deposit. Thus, evidence of the impact of mobile payments on China’s household money demand can provide a theoretical and practical basis for formulating China’s cash management policy. This paper is divided into seven parts. The first part introduces the research background and the related literature. The second part outlines the theoretical framework of money demand, and the third part introduces the empirical model, data, and variables. In the fourth and fifth parts, we report the empirical results and analyze the heterogeneity, respectively. The sixth part provides the robustness tests and the seventh part concludes the paper. In this paper, we use the data from the fourth round of the nationwide China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) conducted by Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in 2017 to examine the impact of mobile payments on monetary demand at the household level based on the Baumol-Tobin model. To overcome the endogeneity of mobile payments, we use two stage least squares (2SLS) to do the estimation. We find that mobile payments lead to a 25% decrease in household cash and have a significant negative impact on the level of money demand. Specifically, the proportion of M1 decreases by 36.1% and the proportion of M2 decreases by 21.7%, indicating that mobile payments reduce the money demand to different degrees. We also find that the coefficient of the cross-terms between the transaction cost proxy variables and mobile payments is significantly negative, indicating that changes in transaction costs may be an important channel for mobile payments to affect the demand for cash. Furthermore, using a quantile regression, we find that the effect of mobile payments on the precautionary money demand is greater than that of transactions. The impact of mobile payments on the money demand also varies significantly for different age levels, education levels, urban and rural areas, Eastern and Western regions, and different cities. Specifically, mobile payments have a greater negative impact on the proportions of M0 and M1among elderly households. For households with a lower education level, mobile payments have a relatively large negative impact on M0 and M1, but a relatively small negative impact on M2. We also find that the level of urban development has a significant effect on the role of mobile payments. Finally, we analyze the effects of debit card, credit card, bank card, and computer payments on the proportion of cash, and the estimated coefficients are all significantly negative. This shows that the change in the method of payment has had a profound impact on the amounts of cash that households hold. Although mobile payments are very convenient, the web-based and immaterial characteristics of the system pose numerous possible risks in terms of security. To encourage the use of mobile payments, it is necessary to strengthen the supervision of risk during use, formulate laws and regulations to regulate the behavior of both sides of the transaction, and strengthen the security of the platform using fintech, so that mobile payments can play a key role in cash management. Overall, this paper makes the following contributions. First, from a micro perspective, we study the impact of mobile payments on monetary demand at the household level. Second, we define the M0, M1, M2 of a household according to the monetary level standards set by the People’s Bank of China. Third, we analyze the influence of transaction costs on the demand for cash and confirm the findings of the Baumol-Tobin model.
尹志超, 公雪, 潘北啸. 移动支付对家庭货币需求的影响——来自中国家庭金融调查的微观证据[J]. 金融研究, 2019, 472(10): 40-58.
YIN Zhichao, GONG Xue, PAN Beixiao. The Effect of Mobile Payments on Household Money Demand: Micro Evidence from the China Household Finance Survey. Journal of Financial Research, 2019, 472(10): 40-58.
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