Topic: Does E-Commerce Crowd Out Consumer Spending Offline?
Speaker: Wenlan Qian, Associate Professor of Finance, National University of Singapore Business School
Date: September 18, 2019 (Wednesday)
Time: 10:00am-11:30am
Location: 1-301, Building 1
Language: English
Abstract:
By exploiting the world’s largest E-Commerce shopping holiday, China’s Singles Day, we study whether and to what extent E-Commerce crowds out local, offline spending. Using debit and credit card transactions of a large, representative sample of consumers from the country’s dominant payment service provider, we find that consumer card spending at the brick-and-mortar stores increases by an average 11% on Singles’ day during the period of 2013-2017. The increase is driven by spending of physical retail goods, while the offline spending on dining, entertainment and travel appears no different from the baseline period. The response is prevalent across years and among consumers with different demographics and preferences. Gauging the source of online-offline complementarity, we show a stronger (and more persistent) spending increase on the shopping-experience-dependent products. In addition to large, geographically-close, and familiar stores, consumers equally increase their offline spending at small, far, or new merchants on the Singles’ day, which also suggests information spillover benefits of E-Commerce. Despite the large(r) price promotions offered online, the offline spending (via bank cards) on the Singles’ day amounts to over 60% of Alibaba’s same-day online sale in our sample period.
About the speaker:
Wenlan Qian is Associate Professor and Dean's Chair in the Department of Finance at the NUS Business School, and Deputy Director of Research at the Institute of Real Estate Studies at the National University of Singapore. She is fellow of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economics Research and the Homer Hoyt Weimer School of Advanced Studies in Real Estate and Land Economics. Currently, Wenlan Qian is editor of Real Estate Economics, a board member of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, and associate editor of Financial Management. Wenlan Qian's main research interests are household finance, real estate, digitization and FinTech, short sellers, financial intermediaries. She is the recipient of multiple prestigious external grants, including NBER Household Finance/Sloan Foundation Research Grant, National Natural Science Foundation of China, and Real Estate Research Institute Research Grant. Wenlan Qian's work also won the best paper awards at leading international conferences in finance and real estate, such as the Society of Financial Studies Cavalcade conference and the AREUEA international meeting. Her research is published at top academic journals such as American Economic Review, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Review of Economics and Statistics, Management Science, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Real Estate Economics, and Review of Finance. Wenlan Qian holds a PhD in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.
