Modern technology provides the basis of an efficient low-cost electronic payments as an alternative to the current system where fiat money is the medium of exchange. This paper explores possible macro-economic implication, showing how such a financial system might enhance government's ability to...

By comparing uncollateralized business loans made by a big tech lending program with conventional bank loans, we find that big tech loans tend to be smaller and have higher interest rates and that borrowers of big tech loans tend to repay far before maturity and borrow more frequently. These...

We study the rise of shadow banks in the largest consumer loan market in the US. The market share of shadow banks in originating residential mortgages nearly doubled from 2007-2015. Shadow banks gained a larger market share among less creditworthy borrowers, with a significant share of loans...

This paper assesses the potential impact of FinTech on the finance industry, focusing on financial stability and access to services. I document first that financial services remain surprisingly expensive, which explains the emergence of new entrants. I then argue that the current regulatory...

Incompatibility in market with network effects reduces consumers' ability to "mix and match" components offered by different sellers, but can also spur changes in product attributes that might benefit consumers. In this paper, we estimate the effects of incompatibility on consumers in a classic...

A central issue in privacy governance is understanding how users balance their privacy preferences and data sharing to satisfy service demands. We combine survey and behavioral data of a sample of Alipay users to examine how data privacy preferences affect their data sharing with third-party...

Using an administrative payroll dataset for 2.6 million retail workers, we find that the staggered rollout of a major e-commerce firm's fulfillment centers reduces traditional retail workers' income in geographically proximate counties by 2.4%. Wages of hourly workers, especially part-time...

Digital technology is the representation of information in bits. This technology has reduced the cost of storage, computation, and transmission of data. Research on digital economics examines whether and how digital technology changes economic activity. In this review, we emphasize the reduction...

Data on sales of memory modules are used to explore several aspects of e-retail demand. There is a strong relationship between e-retail sales to a given state and sales tax rates that apply to purchases from online retailers. This suggests that there is substantial substitution between online...

A growing body of empirical literature finds that consumers are relatively limited in how much they search over product characteristics. We assemble a dataset of search and purchase behavior from eBay to quantify the returns, and thus implied costs, to consumer search on the internet. The...