Financial Technology and Analyst Market, a paper co-authored by Ding Na, first author & a young teacher from our school, Jin Jing from Value Simplex, and Professor Tian Xuan from Tsinghua University, was published in the 2020 9th Issue of Economic Research Journal.
By employing China’s fintech enterprise database and the original data about various types of coverage of listed companies, the authors construct the indicator of fintech attention to listed companies, and investigate the effect of fintech platforms on the analyst market in the financial information service sector. The results show that, from the perspective of information market supply, after fintech platforms get involved in the financial information sector, the share of analysts’ coverage in the whole sector begins to decrease, which indicates a substitution effect brought by fintech platforms on the analyst market, and such effect is more pronounced in samples where analyst attention is relatively little. Moreover, the paper further validates, from the perspective of market efficiency, that fintech attention obviously reduces the effective information contribution made by analysts in the stock trading market.
This paper contributes in the following aspects: Firstly, fintech-related business has gradually penetrated into the financial market, but there is scanty research on it. Existing literature mostly deals with the causes and path of its development, and explores regulatory thinking and policy implications, stopping at the macro level. But starting from the micro level, this paper probes into the effect of fintech platforms on the behaviors of market participants in the information service area, which is a further extension of existing literature. Secondly, the absence of metrics has restricted the development of academic studies in the fintech sector. By employing the financial information service sector in the fintech enterprise database, and combining the original data about various coverage of listed companies provided by the CSMAR database, this paper works out the indicator of fintech attention from massive data and through manual matches, laying the foundation for subsequent empirical studies over fintech development. Thirdly, as a new format of the financial industry, fintech involves a number of niche sectors. Currently, studies of fintech are mainly focused on P2P lending, equity crowdfunding, mobile payment, etc., while research on other sectors is relatively rare. This paper investigates the market influence of information service-based fintech, serving as a supplement to existing literature on this sector. Fourthly, the findings of the paper show that the rise of fintech platforms will have a substitution effect on the analyst sector, and analysts shall find it essential to enhance their professional skills and then market efficiency in a new competition landscape.
