Forthcoming in the Journal of Banking and Finance: “Bank Misconduct and Online Lending”

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“Bank Misconduct and Online Lending” with Isaiah Hull, Yingjie Qi and Xin Zhang, Journal of Banking and Finance (forthcoming)

  • Abstract: We introduce a high quality proxy for bank misconduct that is constructed from Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) complaint data. We employ this proxy to measure the impact of bank misconduct on the expansion of online lending in the United States. Using nearly complete loan and application data from the online lending market, we demonstrate that bank misconduct is associated with a statistically and economically significant increase in online lending demand at the state and county levels. This result is robust to the inclusion of bank credit supply shocks and holds for both broader and more narrowly-defined bank misconduct measures. Furthermore, we show that this effect is strongest for lower rated borrowers and weakest in states with high levels of generalized trust. (A13, G00, G21, K00)
The figure shows the estimated difference in the P2P’s share of total debt between treated and control counties. The horizontal axis shows the number of months that have elapsed since a major banking scandal occurred in the treatment counties. The vertical axis shows the difference in the P2P’s share of total debt. We identify the date of bank scandals through the use of newspaper articles drawn from Factiva and CFPB enforcement actions. These events are also associated with sharp increases in the number of reported CFPB complaints.
  • Keywords: financial development, consumer loans, bank misconduct, FinTech.