This chapter provides new evidence on borrowers' hidden information about their riskiness and its link to their impatience. To do so, I analyze consumer loans on the German platform Smava, which has a unique peer-to-peer lending process. Observationally identical but unobservably riskier...

Chapter 1 theoretically shows why lenders ration loan size and loan applicants to screen borrowers' riskiness in a competitive spot loan market with imperfect information. Chapter 2 theoretically examines how lenders can reduce costs to screen borrowers' riskiness by a commitment to grant a loan...

Many loan commitment contracts contain a material adverse change clause which allows banks to renege or step back from their commitment based on rather subjective claims regarding the borrowers' prospective financial situation. While this sounds like an attractive option for banks, empirical...