关键词: 老龄化, 金融科技创新, U型

Abstract:

The deep integration of Internet, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, big data and other technologies with financial services has produced FinTech, and the innovation of FinTech is closely related to the characteristics of financial service objects. At present, China is facing the realistic problem of population aging. With the increase of the proportion of the elderly population in the total population, this population age change has a significant impact on social entrepreneurship and residents’ savings. As age is one of the most important influencing factors of the entrepreneurial choice, aging not only reduces the entrepreneurial probability of the elderly themselves, but also reduces the entrepreneurial probability of the young people in the society. It has an inhibitory effect on entrepreneurship as a whole, and the improvement of the entrepreneurial level accelerates the FinTech innovation. Therefore, aging can inhibit the FinTech innovation through the entrepreneurial effect. On the other hand, due to the era background of Chinese elderly people’s life, they have the behavioral inertia of precautionary savings and the strong concept of Heritage Inheritance, thus China’s aging phenomenon is accompanied by a high savings rate, which is contrary to the prediction of the life cycle theory. In other words, aging has increased the savings rate of the Chinese society, and the increase of the savings rate has effectively promoted the innovation of the FinTech by increasing the demand for FinTech services from the five financial functions, i.e., savings, financing, payment, risk management and financial consultation. Therefore, aging has both positive and negative effects on the FinTech innovation. Generally speaking, the creation of new enterprises for entrepreneurship will inevitably reduce the savings level of entrepreneurial subjects, and the reduction of entrepreneurial willingness caused by aging means that the elderly deposit these potential funds for entrepreneurial preparation as savings, which indicates that the mechanism of aging inhibiting the FinTech innovation may play a greater role in the early stage, and the mechanism of increasing the savings rate and promoting the FinTech innovation plays a greater role in the follow-up, that is, the negative force of aging to inhibit the FinTech innovation is stronger in the early stage, so as to inhibit the FinTech innovation, but with the increasing level of aging and the passage of time, the positive force of aging to promote the FinTech innovation becomes stronger. When the promoting effect outweighs the inhibiting effect, aging will promote the FinTech innovation.
On the basis of the theoretical analysis, this paper constructs keywords from three dimensions of the technical motivation, the FinTech innovation of traditional institutions and the FinTech innovation of emerging institutions, uses crawler technology for the text mining, and calculates the provincial FinTech innovation index from 2008 to 2018 combined with the critical method, which is used to further empirically test the impact of aging on the FinTech innovation and its mechanism. The results of the fixed effect analysis show that there is a “positive U” nonlinear relationship between the degree of aging and the level of the FinTech innovation. This conclusion is also confirmed by the robustness test of the instrumental variables, the System GMM model, the replacement of the explained variables and the core explanatory variables, and the random effect model. There is an inflection point in the degree of aging that affects the FinTech innovation. When the degree of aging is less than 11.0145%, the progress of aging will inhibit the FinTech innovation. Beyond this inflection point, the further deepening of the degree of aging will promote the FinTech innovation. The mechanism test shows that aging affects the FinTech innovation by inhibiting entrepreneurship and encouraging savings. Aging restricts the FinTech innovation by inhibiting the entrepreneurship level and promotes the FinTech innovation by increasing the savings rate. In this regard, in order to promote the FinTech innovation, China’s regulatory sandbox needs to consider the impact of the financial behavior of elderly consumers on the FinTech innovation. At the same time, it should actively introduce relevant policies conducive to the entrepreneurship of middle-aged and elderly people, slow down the adverse impact of the decline of entrepreneurial willingness on the FinTech innovation, and move the inflection point of aging on the FinTech innovation to the left.

Key words: Aging, FinTech Innovation, Positive U-shaped