Determinants of defaults on P2P lending platforms in China

Abstract

Chinese P2P lending platforms have an astonishing default rate of 87.2% based on data available in 2019, which indicates the seriousness of the problem this industry faces. Insufficient regulation has resulted in generation of risky services, such as margin finance in 2015 for stock markets and zero down-payment mortgages in 2016 for real estate buyers. Such services are prone to resulting in dramatic losses to investors with the following potential causes: adverse selection caused by information asymmetry of the P2P platform operators, lack of financial knowledge or expertise of the investors, insufficient regulation on P2P platforms, and changes in policies related to stock and real estate markets.Does “Too Big to Fail” (TBTF) apply to Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms in China? Are platforms with large Transaction Volumes or large Total Loan Size safer? This paper aims at answering such questions and identifies other factors that have led to defaults of such P2P lending platforms. In order to generate a more robust model that covers a wider range of factors, we adopt two approaches: Failure Prediction Model and Decomposition Methods. The reason why we have adopted this approach was that the factors that caused failure of such P2P platforms were very complicated and varied in nature. Failure Prediction Model is mainly based on the disclosed transaction or financial data. However, Decomposition Method aims at identification of sources of problem from different groups of factors, such as internal operations and external business environment. Also, another contribution of our research is that the data sets that we have used are from three different sources, which provide us a more comprehensive picture about the risks faced by such P2P lending firms.This study provides evidence that the bond yield, which reflects the liquidity level of the market, is the major reason for P2P platforms’ failure during the research period. Our results also indicate that apart from the size-related factors one also needs to answer the question - “Were platforms with larger Transaction Volumes and Total Loan Sizes safer?” The style factors like the interest rate and ownership, the timing factors like loan maturity and bond yield, and the selectivity factors like popularity are found to be even more significant. Hopefully, our findings could contribute academically to the existing literature in the credit risk estimation of online P2P lending platforms and provide practical support for development of a more effective risk monitoring system for online P2P lending platforms.