普惠金融数字化对商业银行信用风险的影响:理论框架和经验证据OACHSSCD

In the context of the digital economy,digitalization has become an important direction for promoting high-quality inclusive finance.Commercial banks remain central to China's financial system,and their credit risk has important implications for financial stability and the broader economy.It is therefore necessary to examine whether and how the digitalization of inclusive finance,as an external shock,affects commercial banks'credit risk.Existing studies have not sufficiently clarified the conceptual boundaries and economic meaning of the digitalization of inclusive finance,and research directly examining its impact on bank credit risk remains limited. This paper constructs a theoretical framework incorporating banks'digital transformation decisions and explains the mechanisms through which the digitalization of inclusive finance affects credit risk.Unlike digital financial inclusion,the digitalization of inclusive finance focuses on the digital transformation of inclusive financial service delivery,particularly in terms of mobility,affordability,credit-based access,and convenience.In the early stage,this process may disrupt banks'traditional business models through affordable microcredit and mobile,credit-based,and convenient payment services.Such changes may intensify competition,increase short-term adjustment pressure,and crowd out resources for digital maintenance and upgrading,thereby weakening credit-risk management and increasing credit risk.In the later stage,technological spillovers may become dominant,promoting banks'digital transformation and improving customer identification,credit screening,post-loan monitoring,and early-warning capabilities.Accordingly,the model predicts an inverted U-shaped relationship between the digitalization of inclusive finance and bank credit risk. Empirically,this paper uses data from 53 listed commercial banks in China and employs fixed-effects and causal mediation models to identify and quantify the theoretical mechanisms.The results show that the digitalization of inclusive finance has a significant inverted U-shaped effect on bank credit risk:it raises credit risk at early stages but reduces it as digitalization deepens.This finding remains valid after endogeneity correction and robustness checks.Mechanism tests indicate that bank digital transformation is the main transmission channel:the digitalization of inclusive finance significantly affects banks'digital transformation processes,which in turn influence credit risk.By contrast,the effective interest spread does not play a robust mediating role.Heterogeneity analysis shows that banks with higher capital adequacy and less binding liquidity constraints are more resilient during the initial shock period,while banks with higher capital adequacy and higher loan-to-deposit ratios achieve stronger credit-risk mitigation effects when technological spillovers become more prominent. The contributions of this paper are twofold.First,theoretically,it clarifies the conceptual boundaries and economic meaning of the digitalization of inclusive finance,integrates it into a mathematical model with bank digital transformation,and constructs a framework linking it to bank credit risk.This framework derives the inverted U-shaped relationship and explains its mechanisms.Second,empirically,using 53 listed banks in China,this paper applies fixed-effects models,causal mediation models,and related methods to identify the causal mechanism of"digitalization of inclusive finance → bank digital transformation → credit risk",and characterizes heterogeneous responses across banks with different capital adequacy levels and loan-to-deposit ratios. Based on these findings,this paper proposes the following policy implications.First,the digitalization of inclusive finance should be promoted more actively while maintaining safeguards against systemic financial risk.Second,commercial banks should maintain a firm commitment to digital transformation and build forward-looking capabilities in talent,technology,and data infrastructure.When facing external technological shocks,they should respond prudently,avoid cutting long-term technology investment during the shock period,and absorb external advanced technologies during the spillover period by embedding them into credit approval,post-loan monitoring,and early-warning systems.Finally,banks should adopt differentiated strategies based on their capital adequacy levels and loan-to-deposit ratios,while regulators should establish differentiated risk early-warning mechanisms.