USC Marshall

In the past decade, the proliferation of online marketplace lending has been disrupting the consumer credit market, especially personal loans used for debt consolidation. These lenders, for example, Lending Club, transcend the geographic boundaries within which local banks operate and offer homogeneous access and terms to borrowers. However, the ultimate benefits borrowers derive from marketplace lending can differ significantly because local alternatives may be used to replace marketplace loans when they are available and favorable. Correspondingly, if local bank competition drives the substitution of an existing marketplace loan with a traditional bank loan, the promise of equal benefits to all borrowers from marketplace lending is unlikely to fully materialize. This competitive dynamic also has implications for policy making, particularly in judging the ramifications of bank mergers and acquisitions. We utilize data from Lending Club, a major peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform, to study whether local market structure drives heterogeneous incentives of traditional banks to convert borrowers of marketplace lending to conventional bank loans. The results indicate that a borrower who resides in a more competitive market is more likely to pay off a P2P loan early by making a large, one-time payment compared with a borrower from a less competitive market. Thus, borrowers from different markets do not benefit equally from online marketplace lending disrupting the consumer credit market. Our study has implications for online marketplace lending, other FinTech-based markets, and the consumer credit market in general.

This paper examines the potential economic spillover effects of a home-sharing platform—Airbnb—on the growth of a complimentary local service—restaurants. By circumventing traditional land-use regulations and providing access to underutilized inventory, Airbnb attracts visitors to locales that are not traditional tourist destinations. Although visitors generally bring significant spending power, it is unclear whether visitors use Airbnb primarily for lodging and thus do not contribute to the adjacent economy. To evaluate this, we focus on the impact of Airbnb on the restaurant employment growth across locales in New York City (NYC). Specifically, we focus on areas in NYC that did not attract a significant tourist volume prior to the emergence of a home-sharing service. Our results indicate a salient and economically significant positive spillover effect on restaurant job growth in an average NYC locality. A one-percentage-point increase in the intensity of Airbnb activity (Airbnb reviews per household) leads to approximately 1.7% restaurant employment growth. Since home-sharing visitors are lodging in areas that are not accustomed to tourists, we also investigate the demographic and market-structure-related heterogeneity of our results. Notably, restaurants in areas with a relatively high number of White residents disproportionately benefit from the economic spillover of Airbnb activity, whereas the impact in majority Black areas is not statistically significant. We validate the underlying mechanism behind the results by evaluating the impact of Airbnb on Yelp visitor reviews, revealing that areas with increased Airbnb activity experience a surge in their share of NYC visitor reviews. This result is further validated by evaluating the impact of a unique Airbnb neighborhood-level exogenous policy recently implemented in New Orleans.