Abstract: The number of problems with P2P online lending platforms in China has been increasing year by year, especially since June 2018, the “mine exploding” phenomena have been seen frequently. An important reason for P2P online lending platforms running into problems is the default of borrowers, so it is significant to study the characteristics of defaulted borrowers for the healthy development of the industry. According to the existing literatures, there is great difference between the divorced and the married. Then, are there any loan default differences between the divorced and the married borrowers? Based on the data from a famous P2P online lending platform -- jiurong.com, this paper employs the ordered multi-classified Logit model, the ordered multi-classified Probit model and other methods to explore the relationship between borrowers’ marital status and loan defaults. In order to study the loan defaults of borrowers more accurately, the degrees of loan defaults are divided into three levels from lower to higher: non-default, general default, and serious default. It is found that the divorced borrowers have higher degree of loan default than the married borrowers.

Key words: peer-to-peer online lending; loan default; divorce; Jiurong net