A Study On The Influence Of Smart Phones On Household Financial Asset Structure

High-quality development cannot be achieved without an increase in the income of millions of households,and the increase in income cannot be achieved without an improvement in investment performance,which cannot be achieved without an improvement in the performance of financial investment.Therefore,an important way to maintain the income growth of Chinese households in the future is to increase their financial investment participation and improve their financial asset allocation structure.In reality,the imperfect development of financial markets has made the participation of households in financial investment generally low in China,and those households with financial investment mainly hold low-risk and low-return assets.The advances in communication technology represented by smartphones bring new possibilities to improve this situation.This paper proposes eight hypotheses about the impact of smartphones on household financial investment participation and financial asset structure: 1.Smartphone use increases household financial investment participation;2.Smartphone use increases household risk-free financial investment participation;3.Smartphone use increases household risky financial investment participation;4.Smartphone use increases household financial investment Depth of financial investment;5.Smartphone use will play a role in increasing the participation and depth of financial investment instead of traditional trading facilities;6.Financial investment participation of households in the East is more affected by smartphones than in the Midwest;7.Depth of financial investment of households in the Midwest is more affected by smartphones than in the East;8.In addition to smartphones,some unobserved factors,such as venture capital expertise,real economy entrepreneurial intentions,etc.,also have a significant impact on the structure of household financial assets.This paper uses micro data from the "China Household Finance Survey(2015,2017,2019)" to test and analyze these hypotheses,where Probit and Tobit models are used for hypotheses 1-7,and random effects Probit,random effects Tobit,mixed OLS,random effects,and fixed effects models were used for hypotheses 1,2,3,4,and8,and the following main conclusions were obtained.First,all of the above eight hypotheses were tested.Secondly,for hypothesis 5,the interaction term of "number of securities offices per 10,000 people" and "number of bank offices per 10,000 people" with "smartphone" in each province was added,and the interaction term of "whether the household has online shopping experience" was used.Probit and Tobit regressions are conducted using "whether the household has online shopping experience" as the instrumental variable.The regression results for the dependent variable "stock investment participation" show that the coefficients of "smartphone" and "number of securities offices per 10,000 people" are 9.406 and36.795,respectively,and both are significant.Both of them are significant.This indicates that both factors directly increase the participation in stock investment.The significant negative coefficient of the interaction term(-46.227)and its absolute value is greater than the coefficient of "number of securities offices per 10,000 people",which further suggests that smartphones have largely replaced traditional trading facilities in promoting household participation in stock investment.This is because smartphones break the time and space constraints of traditional trading models and allow investors to access more and better information at lower costs.Finally,for hypothesis 8,by running the same mixed OLS,random effects and fixed effects regressions on the same panel data and comparing the results of the three regressions,we find that in addition to smartphones,some unobserved factors,such as households’ expertise in venture capital and willingness to start a business in the real economy,also have a significant impact on households’ financial asset structure.Based on the above findings,this paper puts forward policy recommendations: the government should provide reasonable guidance,strengthen the management of product grading and classification,and continue to promote the popularity of smartphones;strengthen financial supervision to ensure the safety of funds and regulate the construction of network information to prevent the proliferation of misinformation;prevent excessive innovation of Internet financial products and formulate reasonable entries of financial products,etc.