Despite the explosive growth of peer-to-peer lending in the People's Republic of China (PRC), information asymmetry remains a critical issue and is likely to be amplified in such an evolving credit market compared to a traditional credit market. This paper studies how investors screen the...

This paper investigates the extent to which the regional credit market structure, in terms of the presence and lending capacity of traditional banks, shapes the growth and local outreach of online lending marketplaces using peer-to-peer lending data. Using an instrumental variables (IV)...