Examining the spillover effect of sustainable consumption on microloan repayment: A big data-based research

Abstract

Social value-oriented consumers perform more sustainable consumption than conventional consumers do because consumers’ choices reflect their latent social values on environmental protection. However, whether sustainable consumption prompts more social value-oriented behaviors outside the consumption domain remains uncertain. The increased availability of consumer-level big data presents an opportunity to investigate consumers’ cross-domain behavior subsequent to sustainable consumption, which broadens the comprehension of sustainable consumption by going beyond the boundary of consumption behavior. Supported by a joint dataset comprising information on both consumers’ consumption behavior and their microloan repayment behavior, this study examines the effects of sustainable consumption on consumers’ subsequent debt default behavior to empirically test the cross-domain spillover effects of sustainable consumption behavior. The results suggest that the default probability of green consumers overall was 4.34 % lower than that of nongreen consumers, even though this positive effect on repayment disappears when sustainable consumption is for health reasons. The findings contribute to research on sustainable consumption by providing empirical evidence indicating that sustainable consumption has positive spillover effects in other domains. The results also provide an alternative perspective for identifying high-quality borrowers for microloan platforms.