4.4 Article

When Words Sweat: Identifying Signals for Loan Default in the Text of Loan Applications

Journal

JOURNAL OF MARKETING RESEARCH
Volume 56, Issue 6, Pages 960-980

Publisher

SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0022243719852959

Keywords

consumer finance; loan default; machine learning; text mining

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Funding

  1. Columbia Business School
  2. Lerner College at the University of Delaware

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The authors present empirical evidence that borrowers, consciously or not, leave traces of their intentions, circumstances, and personality traits in the text they write when applying for a loan. This textual information has a substantial and significant ability to predict whether borrowers will pay back the loan above and beyond the financial and demographic variables commonly used in models predicting default. The authors use text-mining and machine learning tools to automatically process and analyze the raw text in over 120,000 loan requests from Prosper, an online crowdfunding platform. Including in the predictive model the textual information in the loan significantly helps predict loan default and can have substantial financial implications. The authors find that loan requests written by defaulting borrowers are more likely to include words related to their family, mentions of God, the borrower's financial and general hardship, pleading lenders for help, and short-term-focused words. The authors further observe that defaulting loan requests are written in a manner consistent with the writing styles of extroverts and liars.

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