Economic Disruptions in Repayment of Peer Loans

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper addresses a very interesting topic for the journal audience, the possibility to analyse and anticipate the repayment of peer-to-peer loans facing economic disruptions. The data used for this study seems very interesting and may be used for a series of several future analyses.

However, there are some issues that need to be addressed and improved, in my opinion.

1. Introduction:  please try to be more concise within your introduction. I suggest to reposition your description of data (hardship reasons, description of loans included in the sample data) to the empirical study section. The introduction should focus more on context, motivation of the research, state of research, aim of your study and principal conclusions. You reached most of these points, but they are hard to follow among the other information related to the description of your data.

2. Your literature review should be improved with an in-depth analysis. You refer to a research gap in lines 65-66 but I consider that a deeper literature review should support the identification of such a research gap. Please elaborate more on the literature in your field topic. 

3. In line 359 you refer to “housing situation” as a significant attribute resulted from your study and refer to Table 4, but Table 4 contains no data on such indicator. Please check and revise. 

Also, please explain the use of “*” in Table 4 since all the shown p-values are the same but the use of “*” signs is not. You refer only to some indicators in lines 358-361 to be included as relevant in your analysis, but Tabel 4 shows more. Why is that?

4. The use of “*” signs in Table 7 seems to be opposed to the indication that p-value is significant < 0.0001. Please revise. Considering this, please discuss on such findings also considering your Figure 5.

5. Please check your in-text references to all tables and figures and their correct identification. I couldn’t observe references to Figures 4,6,9 or tables 6 and 8. References to figure 8, 10 and Table 14 should be corrected.

6. In your discussion section, please state which are the specific findings on each of the 4 hypotheses of your study. For example, state which are the specific job titles that are more or less resilient to hardships as per your study, which are the specific attributes in the barometer profile etc. 

At this stage, it seems that your discussion section is separate from your previous sections: it refers to a set of observational graphs of the means of different indicators; it looks like it is actually a descriptive analysis, and has no obvious relationship to the analysis based on the jobs titles feature which you previously developed. Even though you refer to predictions for figures 14, 15 and other, it’s not clear to which predictive methods you refer to, since these figures are descriptive graphs. 

The analysis that you developed on the job title feature is very interesting and it follows an interesting methodology. The discussion section does not follow the same methodology and should be revised. I suggest to keep in your discussion section the interpretation of your previous results, where possible compared to other studies. At the end of your discussion section, please explain the implications of your study, describe the limitations and highlight future research directions.

7. In your conclusions section, please state your research main findings. 

8. Please carefully check the in-text citations and the corresponding reference list. Also, please check that all the references used within the text are referenced in the reference list and that all the cited papers in the reference list are cited in the paper. I noticed that you cited Mueller at al in line 64 and Yao&Liu in line 71 but there are no corresponding references in the reference list. Also, you inserted references 2, 3, 4 etc in the reference list but no corresponding in-text citation to such references. Please check and correct.

Overall, I believe that your submitted paper has important potential, but you need to consider improving the above issues.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

A nicely written paper on an interesting and potentially important subject. at the substantive level I have two major remarks to the text: (1) it is much too verbose; the paper could be shorter by at least 3-4 pages without any loss to content or understanding by the readers; (2) there is very little - if anything - about the reasons for choosing the applied methodology, to say nothing of a potential comparison; the data set used allows, clearly, for the use of many alternative statistical and data analysis methods, and so at least a discussion, if not an outright comparison of results, would be at least welcome, or, actually, necessary.

The paper is written in smooth English and reads well, but the Authors put too much trust in their English language fluency. Namely, there are sentences, which tend even to be misleading, or falling into jargon. A corrective touch would improve significantly the quality of the paper (see also above for the excess volume of many fragments of the paper).

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you for your considerable work invested in improving your paper. The current form is much improved, in my opinion, and provides a much clearer presentation of your interesting analysis.

However, you still need to reassess the number and references to your tables and figures. Table 3 is named in your paper but no content is provided, Table 4 is missing or it seems to have been misnamed as Figure 4, there are two Table 10, and Figure 10 is mistyped.

Also, I couldn’t observe the in-text citations to references 1-3, 5, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20, 26 mentioned in your reference list. Please consider improving this part, since the placement of your analysis in a thoroughly analyzed research background will substantiate your findings and will help to highlight your contribution to research.

Good luck with your further research! 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf