FinTech Platforms and Mutual Fund Distribution

This paper was previously entitled “The Economic Impact of Distributing Financial Products on Third-Party Online Platforms.” We are grateful to Brad Barber, Ben Charoenwong (discussant), Robin Döttling (discussant), Darrell Duffie, Hao Jiang, Andrew Karolyi, Jennifer Huang, Xing Huang, Yi Huang (discussant), Xin Liu (discussant), Wenlan Qian, Hongxun Ruan (discussant), Yu Shan (discussant), Clemens Sialm, Laura Stark, Baolian Wang, Joakim Westerholm (discussant), Shangjin Wei, Yizhou Xiao (discussant), Wei Xiong, Bernard Yeung, Xiaoyun Yu, Yao Zeng (discussant), Lu Zheng, and Haoxiang Zhu for valuable discussions and comments. We thank seminar and conference participants at Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance, Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), Lingnan University, Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, National University of Singapore, FISF at Fudan University, the 2021 American Finance Association, the 2019 China FinTech Research Conference, the 2020 Finance Down Under Conference, the 2020 ABFER Specialty Conference on FinTech, the 2021 European Retail Investment Conference, 2021 World Finance Conference, FMA 2021, the 2022 NBER Chinese Economy Workshop and the behavioral finance online seminar organized by Wei Xiong. We are grateful to the Howbuy platform for data provision. We thank Linchen Liu, Shiwen Tian, and Heming Zhang for research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• December 18, 2019
• June 30, 2020
• August 5, 2020