Abstract:
We document new facts in P2P lending market using transaction level data of five thousand accounts from a leading P2P platform. We provide new evidence on male being overconfident in online financial market. Previous literature studying gender effect in stock market, suffers from confounding factors like risk preference, information asymmetry or liquidity constraint. Using P2P investors as a cleaner setting, we find that male investors’ turnover is 1.67% higher than female investors’, and annualized returns 0.24% lower than female investors, other things being equal. The results cannot be explained by preference difference, sample selection or liquidity constraint. Instead, the lower returns of male investors are primarily driven by higher trading cost due to their excessive trading.
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