电子钱包的兴起与先买后付：支付竞争、信用扩张与消费者行为

NBER WORKING PAPER SERIESTHE RISE OF E-WALLETS AND BUY-NOW-PAY-LATER:PAYMENT COMPETITION, CREDIT EXPANSION, AND CONSUMER BEHAVIORWenlong BianLin William CongYang JiWorking Paper 31202http://www.nber.org/papers/w31202NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH1050 Massachusetts AvenueCambridge, MA 02138May 2023We thank Yiping Huang and Xue Wang for their feedback and generous help with data access, Ripple’s University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI) and the FinTech at Cornell Initiative for financial support, and Murillo Campello, Pulak Ghosh, Iftekhar Hassan, Yi Huang, and Huan Tang for detailed comments. Rishi Kumar provided excellent assistance on proofreading the manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge Yiran Ning for data processing assistance. We also thank Huang Chen, Shaohua Chen, Chidi Chidambaran, Jiayin Hu, Hao Liu, Xiaomeng Lu, Cong Peng, Jason Schloetzer, Vicki Tang, Hao Zhang, Li Zhou, Yinggang Zhou, as well as conference and seminar participants at Cornell University, Fudan University Fanhai International School of Finance, Fordham University Gabelli School of Business, Georgetown University, 9th Global Conference on Business Management and Social Science (GCBMS-2023), Peking University, and Xiamen University for helpful feedback and suggestions. Due to the tightened regulation on Internet giants in China, the data provider only permitted us to circulate the results internally (under the manuscript “Demystifying E-Wallets and BNPL”) from late 2020 through late 2022. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.© 2023 by Wenlong Bian, Lin William Cong, and Yang Ji. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.The Rise of E-Wallets and Buy-Now-Pay-Later: Payment Competition, Credit Expansion,and Consumer BehaviorWenlong Bian, Lin William Cong, and Yang JiNBER Working Paper No. 31202May 2023JEL No. E42,G20,G23,G51ABSTRACTThe past decade has witnessed a phenomenal rise of digital wallets, and the COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated their adoption globally. Such e-wallets provide not only a conduit to external bank accounts but also internal payment options, including the ever-popular Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL). We examine, for the first time, e-wallet transactions matched with merchant and consumer information from a world-leading provider based in China, with over 1 billion users globally and a business model that other e-wallet providers quickly converge to. We document that internal payment options, especially BNPL, dominate both online and on-site transactions. BNPL has greatly expanded credit access