The paper investigates the role of network centrality in predicting borrowers' and lenders' behavior in peer-to-peer (P2P) lending. The empirical analysis of data from Renrendai, a leading lending platform in the People's Republic of China, reveals that the lenders who are at the center of a...

Despite the explosive growth of peer-to-peer lending in the People's Republic of China (PRC), information asymmetry remains a critical issue and is likely to be amplified in such an evolving credit market compared to a traditional credit market. This paper studies how investors screen the...

This study examines the impacts of political competition on eco-efficiency. We first develop a theoretical model in which local government officials compete against each other to maximize their own political score. We find that after an initial stage of decline, eco-efficiency eventually turns...

Using a new dataset on foreign direct investment (FDI) and a comprehensive measurement of environmental policy stringency and enforcement, this paper studies the spatial distribution of inbound FDI in manufacturing sectors by accounting for strategically determined environmental policies across...

This paper investigates the role of punctuation in the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market. Using data from Renrendai, one of the largest P2P lending platforms in the People’s Republic of China, we investigate how the amount of punctuation used in loan descriptions influences the funding...

Population aging has significant economic and social costs, and this paper studies its impacts on inequality, both theoretically and empirically. First, we build a two-period overlapping-generation model with an uncertain lifetime and find that population aging has the overall effect of...