Digital finance’s impact on household service consumption—the perspective of heterogeneous consumers

Abstract

With ongoing advancements in financial technology, digital finance has experienced rapid development in China, leveraging big data, cloud computing, and social platforms. Service consumption plays a crucial role as an indicator of households’ ability to achieve consumption upgrades and overall happiness. Internet financing and payment represent two primary types of digital finance. This article aims to assess their impacts on household service consumption. Both types of digital finance have a significant potential to increase household service consumption, which is categorized into seven distinct categories in this article. Digital finance demonstrates a notable ability to enhance consumption in various categories, including daily services, transportation and communication, healthcare, education, entertainment, and tourism. However, it has no significant impact on medical consumption. Finally, the empirical results reveal that digital finance exhibits heterogeneous effects on the service consumption of households with different characteristics.