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We study household finance in the age of FinTech, where consumption, payments, and investments take place via all-in-one super-apps. We hypothesize that FinTech adoption can improve household risk-taking by breaking down the traditional physical and psychological barriers and enhance financial inclusion. Taking advantage of an individual-level FinTech dataset, we find that higher FinTech adoption, both at the individual-level and the county-level instrumented by distance-from-Hangzhou, results in higher participation and more risk-taking in mutual-fund investments. Moreover, individuals who are otherwise more constrained, those with higher risk tolerance or living in under-banked counties, stand to benefit more from the advent of FinTech.
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Hong et al. (2020) studied this question.