Asia's Developing Future

Peer-to-peer or P2P lending is a way of financing debt online so that people can borrow and lend money without going through a financial institution, like a bank. P2P, also known as social lending or crowd lending, has no need for a middleman and has emerged as an alternative to traditional lending institutions around the world. An Asian Development Bank Institute study using data from Renrendai, one of the largest P2P lending platforms in the People’s Republic of China, found something interesting about the use of punctuation marks in P2P lending. Who would have thought that the number of punctuation marks used in borrowers’ text could influence funding probability, borrowing rate, and default of loans in the peer-to peer lending market? Read the transcript http://bit.ly/2HVBmM7 Read the working paper https://www.adb.org/publications/role-punctuation-p2p-lending-evidence-prc About the authors Xiao Chen is a PhD student at Jinan University, People’s Republic of China. Bihong Huang is a research fellow