Certifications are an important signaling device for attenuating information asymmetry. This study examines their role on a Chinese online marketplace lending platform, which grants certifications to borrowers after they submit the necessary documents. Although the platform verifies the...

Individuals increasingly buy mutual funds via on-line platforms, whose ‘best buy' recommendations heavily influence flows. As intermediaries of mutual funds, platforms provide none of the unobservable interaction or intangible benefits of brokers, and so allow clean tests of the determinants,...

A growing number of young and emerging businesses obtain financial resources through open calls over the Internet. Such campaigns are often hosted on specialised platforms that serve as intermediaries between founders and potential funders. In recent years, equity crowdfunding platforms in...

A major consequence of the Internet era is the emergence of complex “platforms” that combine technology and process in new ways that often disrupt existing industry structures and blur industry boundaries. These platforms allow easy participation that often strengthens and extends network...

We study an e-commerce platform’s incentive to enter the credit market and offer loans for vendors’ innovations. The platform earns from both its lending ac- tivity and fees collected on transactions in the marketplace. If the platform does not offer loans, it might find it convenient to...

La versión española de este artículo se puede encontrar en: http://ssrn.com/abstract=4040930.This paper addresses a research agenda of the regulatory challenges of digital financial platforms. After approaching the nature of digital financial platforms, the decentralized finances that arise...

Studies of peer-to-peer lending in the USA find that female borrowers have better chances of getting funds than males. Is differential treatment of borrowers of different sexes a common feature of peer-to-peer lendingmarkets or is it subject to specific businessmodels, ways of fixing loan...

This study investigates the role of gender in financial risk-taking. Specifically, I ask whether female investors tend to fund less risky investment projects than males. To answer this question, I use real-life investment data collected at the largest German market for peer-to-peer lending....

We study the welfare effects of the transition of online debt crowdfunding from the older "peer-to-peer" model to the "marketplace" model, where the crowdfunding platform sells diversifiedloan portfolios to investor. We develop an equilibrium model of debt crowdfunding capturingplatform design...

With thousands of co-existing and competing platforms, the Chinese peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market experienced both high growth and high failure rate. We hand collect unique data for these P2P platforms and investigate the differences in performance and survival for platforms with and without...