Item

Does smartphone use contribute to the consumption upgrading among rural residents in China?

Leng, C.
Ma, Wanglin
Zhu, Z.
Date
2020-06
Type
Conference Contribution - published
Fields of Research
Abstract
Although the effects of smartphone use have been widely examined in the literature, little is known about its impact on people’s consumption in China. To fill in this gap, this paper examines whether smartphone use play an important role in the consumption propensity and consumption structure upgrading among rural residents, utilizing the data collected from the Chinese Social Survey in 2015. The results show that smartphone use contributes to improving the average consumption propensity and culture and entertainment consumption of rural residents, and reduce Engel’s coefficient. We employ a treatment effects model to control the potential endogeneity issues arising from both unobserved factors and the reciprocal causation between smartphone use and consumption behavior. Besides, the quantile regression results show that with the increase of quantile, the impact of smartphone use on rural residents’ average propensity to consume presents an inverted U-shaped trend, and the impact on Engel’s coefficient presents an inverted U-shaped trend. By contrast, smartphone use only exerts a significant positive effect on the high-quantile culture and entertainment consumption propensity. Nonetheless, an additional disaggregated analysis reveals that this impact is heterogeneous among different age groups and geographic regions, as well as between male and female household heads.
Source DOI
Rights
Creative Commons Rights
Access Rights