The impacts of digital finance development on household income, consumption, and financial asset holding: an extreme value analysis of China’s microdata

This paper examines the roles of digital finance development in household income, consumption, and financial asset holding from an extreme value theory perspective. Three types of extreme pairs (Min to Min, Max to Max, and Max to Min) are constructed, corresponding to the three aspects of the economic welfare of digital finance: fairness, efficiency, and their trade-off. Using panel data from the Peking University Digital Financial Inclusion Index of China (PKU-DFIIC) and China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) over time span 2014–2018, this paper models the block maxima and minima of variables by fitting them with generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution. The binary expansion testing (BET) is used to detect the nonlinear dependence between digital finance and household economic variables. The tail quotient correlation coefficient (TQCC) is used to quantify the tail dependencies. The results show that: (1) digital finance has significant fairness effects in reducing poverty, increasing consumption, and promoting financial asset holding; (2) digital finance shows effects of promoting incentives and efficiency in household income and financial asset holding, but this effect is relatively limited in household consumption; (3) digital finance generally increases efficiency without harming fairness in terms of all cases of household income and consumption, and most of the cases regarding household financial asset holding; (4) the positive spatial externality of digital finance exists for all household economic variables; and, for pairs regarding household income and consumption, the wider the scope, the greater the spatial spillover effect. The result of this paper implies many novel policy implications.