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• Working Paper | 2019

  Employment Effects of Alleviating Financing Frictions: Worker-level Evidence from a Loan Guarantee Program

  Boris Vallee, Julien Sauvagnat, Thorsten Martin and Jean-Noel Barrot

  Keywords: Labor; France;

  Citation:

  Vallee, Boris, Julien Sauvagnat, Thorsten Martin, and Jean-Noel Barrot. "Employment Effects of Alleviating Financing Frictions: Worker-level Evidence from a Loan Guarantee Program." Working Paper, July 2019.  View Details

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• Article | Review of Financial Studies | May 2019

  Marketplace Lending: A New Banking Paradigm?

  Boris Vallée and Yao Zeng

  Marketplace lending relies on large-scale loan screening by investors, a major deviation from the traditional banking paradigm. Theoretically, participation of sophisticated investors in marketplace lending improves screening outcomes but also creates adverse selection. In maximizing loan volume, the platform trades of these two forces by choosing intermediate levels of platform pre-screening and information provision to investors. We use novel investor-level data to test these predictions. We empirically show that more sophisticated investors screen loans differently and systematically outperform less sophisticated investors. However, the outperformance shrinks when the platform reduces information provision to investors, consistent with platforms managing adverse selection.

  Keywords: marketplace lending; Screening; sophisticated investors; Adverse selection; Financing and Loans; Performance; Information;

  Citation:

  Vallée, Boris, and Yao Zeng. "Marketplace Lending: A New Banking Paradigm?" Review of Financial Studies 32, no. 5 (May 2019): 1939–1982.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2018 (Revised August 2018)

  OpenInvest

  Shawn Cole, Boris Vallée and Nicole Tempest Keller

  Founded by a team of hedge fund and NGO alumni, OpenInvest launched its platform in 2015 to enable retail investors to tailor their portfolios to their personal values in an automated way, for instance by screening out weapons manufacturers stocks or overweighting LGBTQ friendly companies, while still closely tracking the overall stock market performance. In 2017, bolstered by $3.25 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, OpenInvest was preparing to launch an app targeted at millennial customers that would include a novel proxy voting feature that allowed clients to vote on shareholder resolutions with a simple swipe. With this technological addition, OpenInvest was well on its way towards realizing its mission of democratizing socially responsible investing, bringing transparency to the financial services market, and enabling retail investors to invest their capital in a way that aligned with their values. However, getting to scale and profitability in the crowded robo-advisors space was a critical challenge. The case closes with the founders contemplating expanding or migrating their model from B2C to B2B in order to achieve scale and profitability faster. The case is an opportunity to discuss the theoretical underpinning of creating impact in public markets, to explore how portfolio performance might be affected by Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) screens, and to understand drivers of demand for impacting investing more broadly. The case also explores the challenges the founders face when aiming to design a new product to meet an emerging need and which distribution channel to choose for doing so.

  Keywords: fintech; impact investing; Investment Portfolio; Customization and Personalization; Technological Innovation; Social Issues; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Model; Financial Services Industry;

  Citation:

  Cole, Shawn, Boris Vallée, and Nicole Tempest Keller. "OpenInvest." Harvard Business School Case 218-064, February 2018. (Revised August 2018.)  View Details

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