The Effect and Influence Path of Fintech on Total Factor Productivity of Enterprises

Abstract

The critical transition phase from factor-driven to efficientdriven is being experienced by the Chinese economy. Total factor productivity (TFP), as the core measurement index to measure the high-quality economic transformation and development and Fintech has opened up a new path for enterprises to improve production and operation efficiency. Although existing research has gradually focused on the relationship between fintech and enterprise efficiency, obvious deficiencies still exist in both the integrity of the research framework and content.: First, most studies rely on provincial fintech metrics, which cannot accurately capture the actual situation of fintech services available to enterprises at the prefecture level; Secondly, most studies stay at the level of correlation analysis and fail to identify the causal relationship through methods such as policy shocks. Firstly, this paper selects non-financial listed companies in China’s A-share market from 2011 to 2018 as the research object and empirically verifies that the development of fintech has A significantly positive impact on corporate total factor productivity. To further identify the causal relationship, the Difference in Difference (DID) model is constructed with the 2016 the ‘Development Plan for Promoting Inclusive Finance (2016-2020)’ as the policy shock to confirm the causal promoting effect of fintech on corporate TFP. On the one hand, this study provides empirical support for fintech to empower the real economy at the micro enterprise level; On the other hand, the results have important policy implications for optimizing the allocation of regional financial resources.