Abstract: When facing the challenge of insufficient consumption demand, the government often alleviates this problem through active fiscal policies. The financial environment is an important factor influencing the efficiency of fiscal expense. Digital finance has been changing the financial environment around residents, driving the upgrading of residents' consumption structure, which may change the relationship between fiscal expenditure and residents' consumption, and affect the efficiency of the fiscal policy. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of the impact of digital finance on the relationship between the active fiscal policy and consumption is of great significance for grasping the time-varying characteristics of the fiscal policy, which is helpful for the government to adjust the structure of fiscal expenditures.
This research makes contributions in the following three aspects. First, it focuses on the impact of digital finance on the relationship between the fiscal expenditure and the household heterogeneous consumption, which is a supplement to the existing research about the relationship between the fiscal expenditure and the household consumption. Second, this study divides the household consumption into the basic consumption, which is complementary to the fiscal expenditure, and residents' spontaneous consumption. It provides a reference for the follow-up research on the relationship between the fiscal expenditure and the consumption. Third, it uses both the micro and the macro data to examine the assumption respectively, which ensures the robustness of the conclusions.
This study divides the household consumption into the basic consumption, which is complementary to the fiscal expenditure, and spontaneous heterogeneous consumption, and studies the changes in the household consumption structure caused by digital finance. This change may alter the relationship between the fiscal expense and the consumption. Based on the theoretical analysis, we conduct an empirical test on the assumption by using the household micro-data from 2012 to 2018, the corresponding fiscal expenditure and the digital finance data of each region. We find that within the scope of this paper, the fiscal expenditure helps to stimulate the household consumption. With the relaxation of residents' financing constraints and the increase in income brought by digital finance, the consumption structure of residents has been continuously upgraded, and the heterogeneous consumption demand has increased. This effect weakens the complementary relationship between the fiscal expenditure and the household consumption. Moreover, instrumental variables are selected to deal with the endogeneity of the article and the macro data are used to verify the robustness of the core conclusions. In order to prove the existence of the digital-finance-consumption structure mechanism, we conduct a heterogeneity analysis of the impact of digital finance on the relationship between different types of fiscal expenditures and different types of consumption. The analysis conclusion of this part proves the existence of the path by which digital finance affects the consumption structure and the effect of the fiscal expenditure. Further research finds that this weakening effect of digital finance is greater on households with high human capital and low income.
According to our analysis, the impact of digital finance on the effect of the fiscal policy should be paid attention to in the process of using active fiscal policy to build domestic economic cycle. According to the changes in the effects of different types of fiscal expenditures, the structure of fiscal expenditures should be rationally adjusted: consumption and transfer expenditures should be increased, and investment expenditures such as economic construction should be reduced. At the same time, attention should also be paid to the heterogeneity effects of digital finance on the relationship between consumption and fiscal expenditure for different groups. Government should strengthen support for groups with low human capital and low income, implement more accurate and targeted fiscal policies to improve the efficiency of fiscal expenditure.

Key words: Digital Finance, Fiscal Expenditure, Household Consumption

摘要： 积极的财政政策是解决居民消费不足问题的主要手段,而金融环境变化是财政政策效果的重要影响因素。本文首先从理论上分析了数字金融背景下财政支出效果的动态变化,进而分别使用家庭微观数据与宏观数据实证检验了数字金融对财政支出与居民消费关系的影响。研究发现:数字金融增加了异质性消费需求,改变了居民消费结构,降低了财政支出引致居民消费的能力。从财政支出结构上看,数字金融对经济建设、社会文教、其他支出等类型财政支出引致消费的减弱作用较强;从消费结构上看,财政支出对居住、家庭设备及用品、文教娱乐、交通通信等高异质性需求消费的引致作用受数字金融影响较大。进一步研究发现,这种减弱作用对高人力资本家庭与低收入家庭的作用更强。因此,在使用积极财政政策刺激消费过程中需认识到数字金融对财政政策效果的影响,合理调整财政支出结构,推动居民消费自发、稳步地提升。

关键词: 数字金融, 财政支出, 居民消费