Financial literacy and self-control in FinTech: Evidence from a field experiment on online consumer borrowing

Di Bu, Tobin Hanspal, Yin Liao and Yong Liu

No 273, SAFE Working Paper Series from Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE

Abstract: We report the results of a longitudinal intervention with students across five universities in China designed to reduce online consumer debt. Our research design allocates individuals to either a financial literacy treatment, a self-control training program, or a zero-touch control group. Financial education interventions improve test scores on general financial literacy but only marginally affect future online borrowing. Our self-control treatment features detailed tracking of spending and borrowing activity with a third-party app and introspection about individuals' consumption with a counselor. These sessions reduce future online borrowing, delinquency charges, and borrowing for entertainment reasons - and are driven by the male subjects in the sample. Our results suggest that self-regulation can affect financial behavior in e-commerce platforms.

Keywords: Financial literacy; online borrowing; Consumer credit; Self-control; FinTech; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 D18 G21 G23 G51 G53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-exp, nep-fle, nep-pay and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/215433/1/1693372886.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:safewp:273

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3469571

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SAFE Working Paper Series from Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().