Does mobile payment adoption really increase online shopping expenditure in China?

Wei Yang, Puneet Vatsa, Wanglin Ma, and Hongyun Zheng (2023) find, with data for China, that women consumers do more online shopping expenditure if they have adopted mobile payment instruments, but they do not find the result for men. We show that Yang et al.’s analysis has multiple weaknesses. Besides a number of econometric mistakes, there is a crucial conceptual flaw in that one should not expect to see a spending effect for respondents who do not own a mobile phone and/or do not shop online. When we eliminate these respondents (and use the appropriate econometric approach), we find completely different results – both in terms of magnitude and where the gender effect is concerned.