NBER WORKING PAPER SERIESMOBILE MONEY, INTEROPERABILITY, AND FINANCIAL INCLUSIONMarkus K. BrunnermeierNicola LimodioLorenzo SpadavecchiaWorking Paper 31696http://www.nber.org/papers/w31696NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH1050 Massachusetts AvenueCambridge, MA 02138September 2023This paper has benefitted from discussions with and the suggestions of Joseph Abadi, Jenny Aker, Francis Annan, Andrew Atkeson, Tania Babina, Oriana Bandiera, Jean-Pierre Benoît, Milo Bianchi, Matthieu Bouvard, Emily Breza, Konrad Burchardi, Daniel Timothy Chen, Jonathan de Quidt, Mitchell Downey, Joshua Gans, Alessandro Gavazza, Jean-Pierre Landau, Rocco Macchiavello, Césaire Meh, Nikita Melnikov, Stelios Michalopoulos, Don Noh, Elias Papaioannou, Paolo Pinotti, Helene Rey, Emma Riley, Nicolas Serrano-Velarde, Tavneet Suri, Tommaso Valletti and seminar participants at Bocconi University, Cornell University - Charles H. Dyson School, Halle Institute for Economic Research, Institute for International Economic Studies, London Business School, Oxford University - Saïd Business School, NBER SI 2023 Digital Economics and AI, 2nd WEFIDEV CEPR Workshop in Finance and Development, 46th BREAD & MIT Conference and other conferences, seminars and workshops. Edoardo Cattaneo, Camilla Cherubini, Ilaria Dal Barco, Daniele Goffi, Falilou Kebe, Hannah Moreno and Beatrice Romagnolo provided excellent research assistance. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.At least one co-author has disclosed additional relationships of potential relevance for this research. Further information is available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w31696NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.© 2023 by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Nicola Limodio, and Lorenzo Spadavecchia. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.Mobile Money, Interoperability, and Financial InclusionMarkus K. Brunnermeier, Nicola Limodio, and Lorenzo SpadavecchiaNBER Working Paper No. 31696September 2023JEL No. E4,O16,O30ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the tradeoff between competition and financial inclusion resulting from the vertical integration between mobile network and money operators. Joining newly assembled data on mobile money fees through the WayBack machine, with sources on network coverage and financials, we examine the staggering across African operators and countries of platform interoperability – a policy that promotes transactions and competition across mobile money operators. Our results show that interoperability benefits users by lowering...
