Financial Technology, Access to Credit, and Behavioral Finance
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (EST)
- Chair: Amit Seru, Stanford University
Why Are Firms Slow to Adopt Profitable Opportunities?
Abstract
Why are firms slow to adopt profitable opportunities? We test the role of four potential barriers: present bias, limited memory, overconfidence about memory, and a lack of trust in other firms. In partnership with a financial technology (FinTech) payments provider in Mexico, we randomly offer businesses that are already users of the payments technology the opportunity to be charged a lower merchant fee for each payment they receive from customers. The median value of the fee reduction is 3% of profits. We randomly vary the size of the fee reduction, whether the firms face a deadline to accept the offer, whether they receive a reminder, and whether we tell them in advance that they will receive a reminder. Reminders increase take-up of the lower fee by 18%, and anticipated reminders by an additional 7%. Deadlines do not increase take-up. We use survey data to understand mechanisms behind the significant additional effect of the anticipated reminder relative to the unanticipated reminder. Receiving an anticipated reminder from the FinTech company increases trust in the offer: it increases firms' perceptions of the offer's value and increases take-up by firms that trust advertised offers less.Can FinTech Reduce Disparities in Access to Finance? Evidence from the Paycheck Protection Program
Abstract
New technology promises to expand the supply of financial services to small businesses poorly served by banks. Does it succeed? We study the response of FinTech to financial services demand created by the introduction of the Paycheck Protection Program. FinTech is disproportionately used in ZIP codes with fewer bank branches, lower incomes, and more minority households, and in industries with fewer banking relationships. It is also greater in counties where the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were more severe. Substitution between FinTech and banks is economically small, implyingthat FinTech mostly expands, rather than redistributes, the supply of financial services.
There's an App for That: Goal-Setting and Saving in the FinTech Era
Abstract
We study the effects of goal-setting on saving behavior, exploiting the exogenous introduction of goal-setting features for saving in a FinTech app. We establish that setting goals increases individuals’ saving rate and show that the effect is causal using a difference-in-differences identification strategy that exploits the random assignment of users into a group of beta-testers that can set goals and a group of users that cannot. Individuals save more for goals with shorter horizon and larger amounts. They also save more when they use another feature of the app that allows them to divide their overall saving into small amounts (e5) throughout the month. The nature of the goal, on the other hand, does not matter. Only one third of the goals is achieved before the deadline, with general goals having a higher probability of being achieved than specific ones. Taken together, our findings indicate that goal-setting has a positive effect on saving, but there is considerable scope to increase its effectiveness, possibly using robo-advising tools.Discussant(s)
Laura Blattner
,
Stanford University
Michaela Pagel
,
Columbia University
Constantine Yannelis
,
University of Chicago
Paolina Medina
,
Texas A&M University
JEL Classifications
- G2 - Financial Institutions and Services
- G4 - Behavioral Finance