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Showing results 1 to 9 of approximately 9.
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Speech
Advances in Digital Currency Experimentation
Remarks at the Singapore FinTech Festival, Singapore.
Working Paper
Technological Innovation and Discrimination in Household Finance
Technology has changed how discrimination manifests itself in financial services. Replacing human discretion with algorithms in decision-making roles reduces taste-based discrimination, and new modeling techniques have expanded access to financial services to households who were previously excluded from these markets. However, algorithms can exhibit bias from human involvement in the development process, and their opacity and complexity can facilitate statistical discrimination inconsistent with antidiscrimination laws in several aspects of financial services provision, including advertising, ...
Report
Technology, the nature of information, and fintech marketplace lending
The retail lending landscape has changed considerably over the past two decades, the most recent example being the rapid growth of online, or FinTech, lending to consumers and small businesses. This paper discusses how the boundary of the firm in the retail lending market is affected by advances in information technology that have turned what was previously soft information on borrower credit risk into encoded hard data that can be precisely transmitted across firms at a very low cost. The ability to collect and process information has become the critical resource for lending decisions, ...
Working Paper
FinTech and Financial Innovation : Drivers and Depth
This paper answers two questions that help those analyzing FinTech understand its origins, growth, and potential to affect financial stability. First, it answers the question of why "FinTech" is happening right now. Many of the technologies that support FinTech innovations are not new, but financial institutions and entrepreneurs are only now applying them to financial products and services. Analysis of the supply and demand factors that drive "traditional" financial innovation reveals a confluence of factors driving a large quantity of innovation. Second, this paper answers the question ...
Working Paper
FinTech Lending, Social Networks and the Transmission of Monetary Policy
One of the main channels through which monetary policy stimulus affects the real economy is mortgage borrowing. This channel, however, is weakened by frictions in the mortgage market. The rapid growth of financial technology-based (FinTech) lending tends to ease these frictions, given the higher quality services provided under this new lending model. This paper establishes that the role of FinTech lending in the monetary policy transmission is further amplified by consumers’ social networks. I provide empirical evidence for this network effect using county-level data and novel ...
Working Paper
FinTech and Banks: Strategic Partnerships That Circumvent State Usury Laws
Previous research has found evidence suggesting that financial technology (FinTech) lenders seek out opportunities in markets that have been underserved by mainstream banks. The research focuses primarily on the effect of bank market structure, limited income, and economic hardship in attracting FinTech companies to underserved markets. This paper expands the scope of FinTech research by investigating the role of interest rate regulation of consumer credit and institutional risk segmentation in FinTech lenders' efforts to solicit new customers in the personal loan market. We find that ...
Working Paper
Financial Technology and the Transmission of Monetary Policy: The Role of Social Networks
Financial technology-based (FinTech) lending is expected to ease U.S. mortgage market frictions that have weakened the transmission of monetary policy to households. This paper establishes that social networks play a key role in consumers’ adoption of FinTech lending, which amplifies the effects of a monetary stimulus. I provide causal estimates of the network effect on FinTech adoption using county-level data. To quantify the role of FinTech lending and network spillovers in the transmission of monetary policy shocks, I build a heterogeneous-agent model with social learning. The model ...
Working Paper
FinTech and Banks: Strategic Partnerships That Circumvent State Usury Laws
Previous research has found evidence suggesting that financial technology (FinTech) lenders seek out opportunities in markets that have been underserved by mainstream banks. The research focuses primarily on the effect of bank market structure, limited income, and economic hardship in attracting FinTech companies to underserved markets. This paper expands the scope of FinTech research by investigating the role of interest rate regulation of consumer credit and institutional risk segmentation in FinTech lenders' efforts to solicit new customers in the personal loan market. We find that ...
Working Paper
Blockchain Economics
The fundamental problem in digital record-keeping is establishing consensus on an update to a ledger, e.g., a payment. Consensus must be achieved in the presence of faults—situations in which some computers are offline or fail to function appropriately. Traditional centralized record-keeping systems rely on trust in a single entity to achieve consensus. Blockchains decentralize record-keeping, dispensing with the need for trust in a single entity, but some instead build a consensus based on the wasteful expenditure of computational resources (proof-of-work). An ideal method of consensus ...