Open public data and household participation in risky financial markets

Abstract We study whether government-provided open public data (OPD) platforms alter how households participate in risky financial markets. Exploiting the staggered rollout of provincial OPD platforms across China and five waves of the China Household Finance Survey, we implement a difference-in-differences design to estimate the relationship between OPD access and household portfolio choices. We find that OPD availability is associated with an increase of about 2.5 percentage points in the probability that a household holds risky financial assets, relative to a baseline participation rate of 25%. Risky asset values and risky asset shares in financial wealth rise accordingly. Our mechanism estimates are consistent with three contributory channels: enhanced financial literacy, increased voluntary attention to financial news, and improved household wealth accumulation. The association between information access and financial literacy is stronger for households with more educated heads. Heterogeneity analyses yield larger estimated associations for male-headed households, high-educated individuals, and residents of more developed eastern provinces—a pattern consistent with the knowledge gap hypothesis, wherein early-stage information technology benefits accrue disproportionately to groups with stronger information-processing capacity. Overall, our evidence links public information infrastructure to lower information frictions, greater household participation in risky asset markets, and what we term universalized information access. We emphasize that universalized access constitutes a necessary but not sufficient condition for participation equality.