Financial Technology Adoption
Financial Technology Adoption Sean Higgins Northwestern University∗ December 10, 2020 Abstract Do coordination failures constrain financial technology adoption? Exploiting the Mexi- can government’s rollout of one million debit cards to poor households from 2009–2012, I examine responses on both sides of the market, and find important spillovers and dis- tributional impacts. On the supply side, small retail firms adopted point-of-sale termi- nals to accept card payments. On the demand side, this led to a 21% increase in other consumers’ card adoption. The supply-side technology adoption response had positive effects on both richer consumers and small retail firms: richer consumers shifted 13% of their supermarket consumption to small retailers, whose sales and profits increased. ∗Department of Finance, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. sean.higgins@kellogg. northwestern.edu. I am grateful to Paul Gertler, Ulrike Malmendier, Ben Faber, Fred Finan, and David Sraer for guidance and support, as well as Bibek Adhikari, David Atkin, Pierre Bachas, Giorgia Barboni, Matteo Benetton, Josh Blumenstock, Emily Breza, Zarek Brot-Goldberg, Ben Charoenwong (discussant), Francesco D’Acunto (dis- cussant), Virginia Gianinazzi (discussant), Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, Ben Handel, Sylvan Herskowitz, Bob Hunt (discussant), Dean Karlan, John Loeser, Nora Lustig, Ted Miguel, Adair Morse, Luu Nguyen, Waldo Ojeda, Jacopo Ponticelli, Nagpurnanand Prabhala (discussant), Michael Reher (discussant), Betty Sadoulet, Emmanuel Saez, Tavneet Suri (discussant), Gabriel Zucman, and seminar participants at ABFER, Atlanta Fed, Boc- coni, Cambridge, CEPR, Dartmouth, Harvard, IDEAS, Inter-American Development Bank, Illinois, London School of Economics, MFA, NBER Summer Institute, NEUDC, Northwestern, NYU, Penn, Philadelphia Fed, Princeton, SFS Cavalcade, Stanford/IGC, Stanford IO Fest, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, UNC, University of San Francisco, UT Austin, WFA, World Bank, WVU, and Yale Y-RISE for comments that helped to greatly improve the paper.
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