How does digital finance impact birth rates: Evidence from China

Digital finance (DF), the integration of tradition financial services and new information technology, has been shown to have various impacts in social behaviour. However, how DF affects people’s fertility behaviour is still under investigation and worth exploring from the point of view of long-term economic growth. By employing a DF index, publicly available city-level birth rates in 287 Chinese cities, we find DF has a negative influence on birth rates. This finding is supported by endogeneity and several robustness tests. Mechanism tests show DF increases investment opportunities and therefore reduces the need of having children for support in old age. DF increases consumption and possibly individualism and also increases women’s economic independence and their opportunity cost of having children, leading to lower birth rates. Given the development of DF is an inevitable trend, we further find that out of the three components of DF index measures, the coverage of DF significantly decreases birth rates, while the higher level of DF development, depth and digitalization, have much less negative impact on birth rates. Finally, this negative impact can be moderated when governments make policy efforts to increase educational and medical resources and provide protection of religion. This paper provides a novel perspective on the influence of DF on social behaviour through DF’s direct impact on investments, consumption and income.