The Impact of Venture Capital Investment on the Performance of Peer-to-Peer Lending Platforms: Evidence from China

The Chinese peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market is expanding quickly but has a relatively poor level of operation. Using panel-structured data from a leading P2P lending portal in China, we investigate the effects of venture capital (VC) investment on the performance of P2P lending platforms. Specifically, we identify a short-term signaling effect and a long-term governance effect of VC investment on platform performance in terms of transaction volume, and numbers of lenders and borrowers. However, we only find a decrease in average interest rates after venture capitalists' (VCs') entry in the long run. Moreover, we verify both the effects of investment from listed VCs, but no signaling effect and a weak governance effect of investment from non-listed VCs. Our analysis provides new insights into how VC investment improves the performance of target firms.