Xinchen Ma

Open banking policies have been introduced by many governments to foster innovation in financial services, yet evidence on their effects on competition remains limited. I construct a novel dataset of fintech app source code and exploit cross-country variation in open banking availability within the same app to identify the impact of open banking on fintechs. I find that open banking significantly boosts fintech app usage and performance, with the strongest gains for lending and investment apps, fintech startups, and during the pandemic when access to traditional banking was limited. Textual analysis of app descriptions shows that incumbent banks most exposed to open banking suffer declines in loan issuance and income but respond strategically by raising fee intensity and improving earning efficiency. The findings are consistent with theories that open banking reduces barriers to entry by weakening banks' monopoly power over consumer data.

We study Apple’s 2020 privacy "nutrition" label policy, which mandates standardized disclosure of apps’ data collection practices. Exploiting the staggered release of labels and using Android versions as a control, we find that iOS apps experience a 14% drop in weekly downloads and a 15% drop in revenue, with stronger effects for more privacy-invasive apps. Extending the analysis to 90 countries, we document systematic heterogeneity in consumer responses explained by institutional and cultural factors. A complementary experiment shows that labels improve comprehension and align behavior with stated concerns, helping to resolve the privacy paradox.

This paper studies the formation and capital-market implications of data-driven partnerships between firms. I assemble a news-based dataset of inter-firm, data-driven collaborations to map the landscape of corporate data sharing. I document the determinants of partnership formation, partner-pair characteristics, and associated stock-market reactions. Exploiting the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a plausibly exogenous shock in a difference-in-differences design, I show that GDPR-exposed firms form more data-driven partnerships, with the increase concentrated in US deals with non-EU partners.

This paper studies how data sharing policy affects app developers’ monetization. We exploit Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which shifts customers’ default data sharing option in the Apple App Store from opt-in to opt-out, as a natural experiment to study how apps change their business model to make money in the privacy-preserving era. We find that after ATT, apps that are used to track users suffer declines of 28% and 10% in downloads and revenue, respectively. Advertising activities of tracking apps are negatively affected among publishers who display fewer banner, full-screen, playable, video ads and advertisers who advertise less aggressively on social networks. Tracking apps also adopt more third-party SDKs for advertising and monetization than non-tracking apps and are switching to less tracking-reliant attribution SDKs. In the long run, ATT causes price rises in in-app purchases.