Women and Trade: Gender\u27s Impact on Trade Finance and Fintech

Woman-owned firms engage differently with finance for trade. The barriers they face in starting and running a business are well-known. Yet, this offers little insight into how they finance their business once globalized. Surveys indicate that finance is often the primary barrier to trade. We seek to deepen and modernize this finding by using a unique data set to explore the patterns of financial access exhibited by woman-owned exporting firms. We show that women face two levels of exclusion in access to finance—access to basic finance and access to trade finance. The latter is driven by characteristics common to firms owned by women. Also, in line with existing work, we show that woman-owned firms tend to turn to informal finance as an alternative more than their male counterparts. However, we also show that women are more likely to adopt fintech as a financial solution than men. This suggests that policies aimed at incentivizing banks to lend more to women may not be solving the right problem

Does Gender Affect Funding Success at the Peer-to-Peer Credit Markets?: Evidence from the Largest German Lending Platform

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 contracts and even national financial systems? We aim at answering this question by providing evidence on loan procurement at the largest German peer-to-peer lending platform Smava.de. Our results show that gender does not affect individual borrower's chances of funding success on this platform, ceteris paribus. Hence, gender discrimination seems to be a platform-specific phenomenon rather than a common attribute of this innovative form of credit markets.gender, access to credit, peer-to-peer lending

Success Factors in Peer-to-Business (P2B) Crowdlending: A Predictive Approach

Peer-to-Business (P2B) crowdlending is gaining importance among companies seeking funding. However, not all projects get the same take-up by the crowd. Thus, this study aims to determine the key factors that drive non-professional investors to choose a given loan in an online environment. To this purpose, we have analyzed 243 crowdlending campaigns on October.eu platform. We have obtained a series of variables from the analyzed loans using logistic regression. Results indicate that loan amount, loan term and overall credit rating are the key predictors of non-professional lender P2B crowdlending success. These findings may be useful for predicting whether the crowd will subscribe to a loan request or not. This information would help businesses to modify specific loan characteristics (if possible) to make their loans more attractive or could even lead companies to consider a different financial option. It could also help platforms select and adapt project parameters to secure their success

Exploring FinTech Lending: The Influence of Financing and Economic Factors on the Success of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Funded Loans

This research intends to integrate financing and economic factors into a unified model to explore their influence on P2P lending successful fundraising. An innovative framework of the ARDL method was utilized to explore the short and long-term effects of the factors model to allow the P2P lending players to make informed decisions and develop effective strategies for sustainable FinTech lending practices. Information asymmetry is a persistent concern, and the quality of information provided by both internal and external sources plays a crucial role in determining lender decisions. It aims to offer a holistic understanding of how these elements interact and collectively influence P2P lending loan success, emphasizing the importance of transparency and efficient online lending practices

Determinants of default in P2P lending

This paper studies P2P lending and the factors explaining loan default. This is an important issue because in P2P lending individual investors bear the credit risk, instead of financial institutions, which are experts in dealing with this risk. P2P lenders suffer a severe problem of information asymmetry, because they are at a disadvantage facing the borrower. For this reason, P2P lending sites provide potential lenders with information about borrowers and their loan purpose. They also assign a grade to each loan. The empirical study is based on loans'' data collected from Lending Club (N = 24, 449) from 2008 to 2014 that are first analyzed by using univariate means tests and survival analysis. Factors explaining default are loan purpose, annual income, current housing situation, credit history and indebtedness. Secondly, a logistic regression model is developed to predict defaults. The grade assigned by the P2P lending site is the most predictive factor of default, but the accuracy of the model is improved by adding other information, especially the borrower''s debt level

Judging Online Peer-To-Peer Lending Behavior: An Integration of Dual System Framework and Two-Factor Theory

The past decade has witnessed a growing number of business models that facilitate economic exchanges between individuals with limited institutional mediation. One of the important innovative business models is online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, which has received widely attention from government, industry, investors, and researchers. Based on dual system framework and two-factor theory, this research proposes a research model to investigate the role of various signals from the P2P platform in affecting lender’s investment decisions. With data collected from PPDAI, a popular Chinese P2P lending site, we test the proposed model with logistic regression and hierarchical linear model. The results reveal that most of the factors perform significantly in lenders’ decision making. We also find the specific information of an auction itself is more important than borrower’s characteristics to a large degree. Finally, the research emphasizes that bid number performs well in moderating most of the relationships between variables

The Role of Online Peer-to-Peer Lending in Crisis Response: Evidence from Kiva

Online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, a new form of microfinance, has been touted as to its prominent potential for reducing world poverty. Although a growing body of research has been devoted to examining online P2P lending, how such platforms actually make a difference in curbing poverty has yet to be fully explored. The Ebola outbreak of 2014 provides us a unique empirical opportunity to explore such broader impacts of online P2P lending. We investigate how the demand and supply sides of P2P lending platforms react to an unpredictable crisis. Employing a difference-in-difference identification strategy with data from Kiva.org, we conduct country- and loan-level estimations. Results show upward trends on both demand and supply sides of P2P lending; borrowers request more financial capital and lenders are more active in their lending behaviors in the post-crisis period. We extend online P2P lending literature by investigating the influences of “off-platform shocks on within-platform behaviors

Crowdfunding: A novel source of finance? Lessons for small firms from a synthesis of the literature

Crowdfunding is an emerging phenomenon whereby agents make an open call for funding to large numbers of potential contributors (‘the crowd’), usually via online intermediaries known as platforms. While the size and variety of global crowdfunding practices continue to grow rapidly, academic research is only now beginning to form a coherent body of knowledge relating to this potentially disruptive financial phenomenon. This aim of this study is to bring together the research literature on crowdfunding from a wide variety of different disciplines and subject areas into a collective whole with the specific aim of providing advice and guidance to small firms seeking to raise entrepreneurial finance. From summarising the current state of knowledge on crowdfunding and providing advice to entrepreneurs, our study contributes to the literature by stimulating various conventional thinking and beliefs in the field