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Journal of Banking & Finance Vol. 116 2020

Bank misconduct and online lending

Christoph Bertsch1; Isaiah Hull1; Yingjie Qi2; Xin Zhang1

1 Swedish National Bank · 2 Stockholm School of Economics

open access

Abstract

We introduce a high quality proxy for bank misconduct that is constructed from Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) complaint data. We employ this proxy to measure the impact of bank misconduct on the expansion of online lending in the United States. Using nearly complete loan and application data from the online lending market, we demonstrate that bank misconduct is associated with a statistically and economically significant increase in online lending demand at the state and county levels. This result is robust to the inclusion of bank credit supply shocks and holds for both broader and more narrowly-defined bank misconduct measures. Furthermore, we show that this effect is strongest for lower rated borrowers and weakest in states with high levels of generalized trust.

DOI
10.1016/j.jbankfin.2020.105822
Volume
116
Pages
105822
Language
en
Sources
openalex crossref bibtex:phds-export.bib

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