Social Lending is one of the latest trends in Social Networking, offering a communication and financial channel between individual borrowers and lenders. The various Social Lending transaction schemes could be subject to multiple security threats, in both financial and technical terms, which could affect the integrity of the service as well as the trust of citizens. This paper provides an overv...

This paper studies an incentive rationale for the use of group lending as a method of financing liquidity-constrained entrepreneurs. The joint liability feature associated with group lending lowers the liquidity risk of default but creates a free-riding problem. In the static setting, the free-riding problem dominates the liquidity risk effect under a plausible condition, thus making group lend...

We exploit the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami as a natural experiment to investigate how aggregate bank lending changes in response to a large and unexpected shock. Using a dataset comprising aggregate bank loans at provincial level, we assess the impact of the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 on aggregate provincial lending in Thailand. The results of a Difference-in-Differences investigation suggest t...

The term online peer-to-peer lending (P2P) describes the loan origination process between private individuals on online platforms were financial institutions operate only as intermediates required by law. Initialized by groups in online social networks, first commercial online P2P lending platforms started in 2005. Thus online P2P lending is a relatively young research field. This paper gives a...

We study lender behavior in the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market, where individuals bid on unsecured microloans requested by other individual borrowers. Online P2P exchanges are growing, but lenders in this market are not professional investors. In addition, lenders have to take big risks because loans in P2P lending are granted without collateral. While the P2P lending market shares some char...

This paper explores how borrowers’ financial and personal information, loan characteristics and lending models affect peer-to-peer (P2P) loan funding outcomes. Using a large sample of listings from one of the largest Chinese online P2P lending platforms, we find that those borrowers earning a higher income or who own a car are more likely to receive a loan, pay lower interest rates, and are les...

The publication of the ‘Fed Boston Study’ drew considerable attention to the long-standing issue of discrimination of minorities in mortgage lending. Federal regulators have since stepped up their efforts to enforce greater compliance of banks with various fair-lending laws. Stengel & Glennon (1999), in their influential paper, offered the industry a statistical methodology that individual bank...

This paper reports the results of a large-scale field experiment designed to test the hypothesis that group membership can increase participation and prosocial lending for an online crowdlending community, Kiva. The experiment uses variations on a simple email manipulation to encourage Kiva members to join a lending team, testing which types of team recommendation emails are most likely to get ...