1,721,086 research outputs found
FinTech Megatrends: An Assessment of Their Industrial and Welfare Implications
Full text linkThis study aims to assess the industrial and welfare implications of FinTech as documented in the literature, by focusing on its four subsectors - online capital-raising platforms, alternative payment systems, AI and robot based investment consultancy, and alternative regulatory compliance service. Key findings obtained include: thanks to the advancement in the technologies of relevancy since the 1990s, the FinTech service providers have greatly enhanced both efficiency of financial intermediation and extent of financial inclusion in the developed as well as developing countries; these alternative financial service providers tend to narrow credit gap caused by information asymmetry between borrower and lender by collecting and utilizing soft data for ex ante credit evaluation; however, some concerns are also raised as to the likelihood of over-leverage by certain segments of P2P platform borrowers, the lack of appropriate skin-in-the-game arrangement in sharing ex post credit losses, and the inadequate consumer protection measures in the face of the heightened cyber-security risk. Based on these findings, an assessment is made as to whether or not the sector is capable of instituting a full-blown risk-based, or marginal-cost, pricing for embedded credit risk. In addition, one particular segment of the FinTech service providers, those affiliated with BigTech companies, is examined in terms of its potential contribution to social welfare not only through posing a heightened competition and contestability to existing financial institutions but also through innovation- and information-sharing among firms within their ecosystems. Included as the main contents in the study are trends and institutional characteristics of the four FinTech subsectors, financial theories of relevancy, the FinTech’s welfare implications, and the regulatory issues to be considered for the sector.
Congestion Effects of Spatial Growth Restrictions: A Model and Empirical Analysis
No full textThe present study characterizes the congestion effect of spatially designated growth controls, such as greenbelt or urban growth boundaries. The developed model demonstrates that the congestion externality caused by a binding growth restriction can understate total welfare costs of the regulation but overstate the amount of welfare transfer from renters of urban land to landowners. This article also examines costs and benefits of different development options given a binding growth restriction, and shows that non‐consideration of the congestion externality is likely to skew choice toward high‐density development. To test the hypothesized regulatory effect, a pooled time‐series and cross‐sectional analysis is performed with the land price data from Seoul, Korea. The results offer evidence of the gradient‐flattening effect of the greenbelt regulation in the study area.1
FinTech Megatrends: What Welfare Implications Can We Draw for Financial Consumers?
No full textThis study aims to assess the welfare implications of the FinTech service providers on financial consumers, by focusing on one particular subsector - the online capital-raising activities (CRA) including P2P lending and crowdfunding.To that end, the key arguments advanced by the recent studies are synthesized as follows: Thanks to the rapid deployment of online platforms and digital data in recent years, the CRA service providers have greatly enhanced intermediation efficiency, which results in lower transaction cost and heightened convenience for financial consumers, and have also extended financial inclusion for marginal borrowers in both developed and developing countries;These alternative service providers tend to narrow the credit gap caused by information asymmetry between borrowers and lenders by utilizing soft data for ex ante credit evaluation; However, some concerns are raised as to the likelihood of over-leverage by certain segments of P2P platform borrowers as well as the heightened risk of cyber-crimes such as identity theft and voice phishing. Based on these findings, policy implications as to designing effective measures of financial consumer protection, both from demand-side and supply-side of the CRA service sectors, are discussed.
House Price Dynamics: A Survey of Theoretical and Empirical Issues
No full textDuring the past decade, the number of studies on intertemporal changes in house prices hasincreased rapidly because of wider availability of extensive micro-level data sets, improvementsin modeling techniques, and expanded business applications. This article reviews the maintheoretical, empirical, and methodological issues related to analyzing house price dynamics.The theoretical issue that has received the most attention is informational efficiency. Theliterature in this regard generally supports our intuition that real estate markets are notefficient—that is, short-run intertemporal changes in house prices and excess returns are foundto be positively serially correlated. No trading rule has emerged that consistently yields above-normal returns, however, because of the substantial transaction costs. The second part of thearticle surveys various methodological issues in estimating house price indices and excess returns.Given severe measurement problems and biases in models, the literature increasingly indicatesthat any result might be an artifact of the price index used rather than a real feature of the market.More research is needed before firm conclusions can be reached about inefficiency in theresidential real estate market.3
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