Abstract: The development of rural finance is crucial to reduce the restriction of rural residents' mobility and promote rural consumption, and rural financial agglomeration is an important reflection of the level of rural financial development. Based on the theory of intertemporal consumption choice, this paper mathematically analyses and sorts out the influence mechanism of rural financial agglomeration on rural residents' consumption, and builds threshold panel model and quantile regression model to test the regional and group differences of the impact of rural financial agglomeration on rural residents' consumption based on the data from 2006 to 2016.Threshold panel model estimates show that rural financial agglomeration has a significant positive impact on rural residents' consumption at the national level, and there is an asymmetric “threshold effect”. When the income level exceeds the threshold, rural financial agglomeration has a significant effect on promoting rural residents' consumption. The different regional study shows that rural financial agglomeration has significant threshold characteristics on farmers' consumption in the central and western regions, but not in the eastern and northeastern regions. Quantile regression model results show that rural financial agglomeration has significant positive impact on rural residents' consumption corresponding to different quantiles. But the impact is asymmetric. The rural financial agglomeration has a greater impact on low-consumption and high-consumption groups. Empirical research results show that how to improve the inclusiveness of rural finance to low-income people and the accessibility to relatively high-income people is still the key to solve rural consumption weakness and alleviate the liquidity constraints of rural residents' production and consumption.

Keyword: financial agglomeration; rural residents' consumption; threshold panel model; quantile regression model