Research
Publication
"Gaining a Seat at the Table: Enhancing the Attractiveness of Online Lending for Institutional Investors" (with Ram Gopal, Xiao Qiao, and Moris Strub), Forthcoming, Information Systems Research [DOI]
Online interactive dashboard with Tableau: Link to Dashboard
Working Paper
"Levelling the Field: Equitable Interest Rates for Unsecured Personal Loans" (with Ram Gopal, Xiao Qiao, and Moris Strub), Job Market Paper
Peer-reviewed conference proceedings: Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS 2023)
Abstract: Interest rates of unsecured personal loans should ideally be based on borrowers' credit risk, free from biases and inconsistencies. In practice, however, interest rates often exhibit distortions that violate this principle. This paper proposes a novel method for determining interest rates that ensures all borrowers have access to credit at rates commensurate with their repayment risk. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset from LendingClub, a major online lending platform, we demonstrate that our method reduces the interest rate gap between borrowers with different credit scores by 38.7% and eliminates biases against African-American borrowers. Loans also maintain their average return on investment across different borrower groups under the new interest rates. Our evaluation employs counterfactual loan outcomes constructed through survival analysis and a large language model, showing that both methods complement each other and improve predictive performance. Our findings highlight the potential for loan providers to enhance fairness, expand credit access, and simplify the investment process for lenders by adopting a more equitable interest rate determination methodology.
Presentations
POMS-HK International Conference, Hong Kong SAR, China, Jan 2024
Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems, Online, Dec 2023
Annual Meeting of Financial Engineering and Financial Risk Management Branch of the OR Society of China, Fuzhou, China, Nov 2023
INFORMS Annual Meeting, Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., Oct 2023
Applied Economics Student Workshop, National University of Singapore, Sept 2023
Asia Meeting of Econometric Society in China, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, Jun 2023
Global AI Finance Research Conference, Singapore, Dec 2022
New Zealand Finance Meeting, University of Auckland, Online, Dec 2022
PhD Student Workshop, City University of Hong Kong, Online, Nov 2022
INFORMS Annual Meeting, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., Oct 2022
Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST), Indianapolis, U.S., Oct 2022
Greater China Area Finance Conference, Xiamen University, Online, Jun 2022
Research Seminars
ESSEC Business School, Dec 2023
University of Florida, Warrington College of Business, Dec 2023
University of Delaware, Lerner College of Business and Economics, Dec 2023
Bentley University, Dec 2023
University of Science and Technology of China, School of Management, Dec 2023
Stevens Institute of Technology, School of Business, Nov 2023
University of Warwick, Warwick Business School, Oct 2023