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Digital multisided platforms and peer-to-peer marketplaces are increasingly attracting attention from scholars, with recent work beginning to examine many of their societal implications. Despite such a focus, only select work has examined the democratization of access to capital by peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms, particularly in the healthcare context. In this study, we investigate the effects of P2P lending platforms on local abortion rates, a medical procedure with both significant financial barriers and significant implications for gender parity. Leveraging the entry of the P2P platform LendingClub into different states within the United States at different times, and a differences-in-differences approach, we find that the entry of LendingClub is associated with an increase in the per-capita abortion rates. Our work thus provides evidence for the social implications associated with, and potentially caused, by digital multisided platforms.
Ozer et al. (Thu,) studied this question.