Speaker: Li Nan (Professor, Department of Economics, Fudan University)
Description: Recently, non-cash payment, an important part of digital finance, has developed rapidly around the world, attracting economists and policy makers' attention. Unfortunately, research on the reasons for the imbalance in the development of non-cash payment is lacking, especially the cultural roots of non-cash payment behavior that needs further investigation. In this paper, we examine the impact of different beliefs in religious cultures in different countries on the use of non-cash payments using transnational data from the World Bank. We find religious culture beliefs do have a significant impact on non-cash payment behavior. In addition, protestants in a country had a significant impact on non-cash payments in comparison with other religious groups. According to the study, when the Protestant population increases by 1%, the non-cash payment population increases by 0.16%, however, when it comes to specific payment methods, the Protestants' proportion has nonsignificant influence over credit card payments. And results remain stable after controlling for various factors such as economic development level and infrastructure and using instrumental variables for two-stage regression. Furthermore, Protestant cultural beliefs can promote the development of non-cash payments, particularly by improving the level of social trust, while the growth of a country's credit information system can weaken the impact. By and large, our study sheds light on the culture factors that affect non-cash payment, which not only adds to the existing research on culture, trust, and financial development but also has practical implications in terms of advancing the development of digital finance.
Time：October 15, 2021 (Friday),14:00-15:30
Venue: Room 403，Building No.11，School of Economics
