This article uncovers the role of financial clustering in creating competitive advantage forincumbents in the Singapore Financial Centre. The revelatory case of the underresearchedSingapore cluster reveals (a) how clustering conditions have influenced thedevelopment of the City as a financial...

This paper explores the sources of agglomeration externalities in enhancing firmperformance, in particular, the pecuniary externality that supports firms’ bottom line.The fundamental argument on increasing returns leads to the premise that cluster sizehas beneficial influence to firm...

This paper studies how demand for labor reacts to financial technology (fintech) shocks based on comprehensive databases of fintech patents and firm job postings in the U.S. during the past decade. We first develop a measure of fintech exposure at the occupation level by intersecting the textual...

We ask whether epidemic exposure leads to a shift in financial technology usage within and across countries and if so who participates in this shift. We exploit a dataset combining Gallup World Polls and Global Findex surveys for some 250,000 individuals in 140 countries, merging them with...

The paper provides an overview of cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance. The discussion lays out potential benefits and challenges of the new system and presents a comparison to the traditional system of financial intermediation. Our analysis highlights that while the DeFi architecture...

A binding interest rate cap on household savings is a common form of financial repression in developing economies and typically benefits banks. Using proprietary data from a leading Chinese FinTech company, we study Fintech's role in ending financial repression in China through the introduction...

This paper studies the economic role of financial institutions in economies where agents' incomes are subject to privately observable, idiosyncratic random events. The information structure precludes conventional insurance arrangements. However, a financial institution -- perhaps best viewed as...

This article reviews the recent literature in economics on small-scale entrepreneurship ("microentrepreneurship") in low-income countries. Major themes in the literature include the determinants and consequences of joining the formal sector; the impacts of access to credit and other financial...

Technology has changed how discrimination manifests itself in financial services. Replacing human discretion with algorithms in decision-making roles reduces taste-based discrimination, and new modeling techniques have expanded access to financial services to households who were previously...

Theories of customer supplier relationships hold that the private information of suppliers about buyers explains the use of trade credit even when there is a competitive banking sector. If suppliers possess private information about their buyers, then the buyer's order size and ability to pay on...