 Trust as an entry barrier: Evidence from FinTech adoptionKeer Yang Journal of Financial Economics, 2025, vol. 169, issue C Abstract: This paper studies the role of trust in incumbent lenders (banks) as an entry barrier to emerging FinTech lenders in credit markets. The empirical setting exploits the outbreak of the Wells Fargo scandal as a negative shock to borrowers’ trust in banks. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find that increased exposure to the Wells Fargo scandal leads to an increase in the probability of borrowers using FinTech as mortgage originators. Utilizing political affiliation to proxy for the magnitude of trust erosion in banks in a triple-differences specification, I find that, conditional on the same exposure to the scandal, a county experiencing a greater erosion of trust has a larger increase in FinTech share relative to a county experiencing less of an erosion of trust. Estimating treatment effect heterogeneity using generic machine learning inference suggests that borrowers with the greatest decrease in trust in banks and the greatest increase in FinTech adoption have similar characteristics. Keywords: FinTech; FinTech adoption; Trust in bank; Bank scandal; Belief heterogeneity; Machine learning and causal inference; Race and gender (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:169:y:2025:i:c:s0304405x25000704 DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2025.104062 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Financial Economics is currently edited by G. William Schwert More articles in Journal of Financial Economics from Elsevier |
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