Cashless payment and financial inclusion
Journal of Financial Economics
2026
open access
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.
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.jfineco.2026.104277
- Volume
- 180
- Pages
- 104277
- Language
- en
- Export
- BibTeX
- Sources
- openalex crossref