The Role of Marital Status in the Online Lending Market: Evidence from the Renrendai Platform

Based on data from the Renrendai platform in China, this paper studies the impacts of marital status on funding success and default. Probit models are employed to perform the main regressions. The empirical results show that married borrowers have the highest rate of funding success, followed by divorced and single borrowers. Although the default risk of divorced borrowers is higher than that of married borrowers, it is not different from that of single borrowers. In addition, this paper uncovers an important joint effect of marital status and education on online lending.