ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Cities
Sec. Urban Economics
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsc.2025.1671032
This article is part of the Research TopicDiffusion Dynamics of Sustainable Development Practices in CitiesView all 3 articles
Digital Finance for Economic Resilience: The Uneven Impact of Fintech across Urban China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
- 2School of Finance, Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing, China
- 3Ocean College, Tangshan Normal University, Tangshan, China
- 4School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This study examines the uneven impact of financial technology (Fintech) on economic resilience with empirical case of Chinese cities. The results reveal a U-shaped relationship between Fintech development and economic resilience: while early-stage Fintech may have limited or even adverse effects, mature Fintech development level significantly enhance resilience. Mechanism analysis shows that Fintech promotes resilience by expanding financial scale and easing financing constraints. Furthermore, the impact of Fintech is found to be heterogeneous: it is more pronounced in cities with lower innovation capacity, smaller populations, and less population density. These findings underscore the transformative but uneven role of digital finance in promoting urban resilience, offering policy-relevant insights for fostering inclusive and regionally balanced development.
Keywords: economic resilience, FinTech, China, Financial constraint, Financial scale
Received: 22 Jul 2025; Accepted: 16 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lv, Li, Liu and Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jia Li, lijia01@cueb.edu.cn
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.