This paper investigates three areas of corporate finance, and the role of alternative finance in contributing to our understanding of these areas. First, we look at disclosure, information asymmetry, and adverse selection, and how different alternative finance solutions are used to mitigate these issues. Second, we examine moral hazard and risk taking and how these behaviours are shaped by new types of alternative finance. Third, we consider the role of control rights, and show how their importance varies by context including types of alternative finance and the country-level institutional setting.

We conjecture that marketplace lending provokes an increase in the quantity of entrepreneurship, particularly in more regionally disadvantaged areas, albeit at lower average quality. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design that exploits exogenous variation in borrowers’ access to marketplace loans along U.S. state borders, we estimate a 10% increase in marketplace lending causes a 0.44% increase in business establishments per capita. The effects are more pronounced for less experienced entrepreneurs, for small and less profitable firms, firms more dependent upon external finance, in industries with lower sunk costs of entry, and for low-income regions with inferior access to financial institutions.