Fintech Platforms and Mutual Fund Distribution

The authors thank the editor William Cong, the associated editor, and two anonymous referees for helpful suggestions. The authors are grateful to Brad Barber, Ben Charoenwong, Robin Döttling, Darrell Duffie, Hao Jiang, Andrew Karolyi, Jennifer Huang, Xing Huang, Yi Huang, Wenxi Jiang, Xiaoyang Li, Xin Liu, Wenlan Qian, Hongxun Ruan, Yu Shan, Clemens Sialm, Laura Stark, Baolian Wang, Joakim Westerholm, Shangjin Wei, Yajun Xiao, Yizhou Xiao, Wei Xiong, Liyan Yang, Bernard Yeung, Xiaoyun Yu, Yao Zeng, Lu Zheng, and Haoxiang Zhu for valuable discussions and comments. The authors thank seminar and conference participants at Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), Lingnan University, SAIF at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the National University of Singapore, FISF at Fudan University, the XJTLU Asset Pricing Workshop, 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 ABFER annual meeting, the 2021 World Finance Conference, AFA 2021, FMA 2021, CICF 2021, the 2022 NBER Chinese Economy Workshop, and the behavioral finance online seminar organized by Wei Xiong. The authors are also grateful to the Howbuy platform for data provision. The authors thank Linchen Liu, Shiwen Tian, and Heming Zhang for research assistance. This paper was previously entitled “The Economic Impact of Distributing Financial Products on Third-Party Online Platforms.”