Digital Collateral

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gertler, Paul; Green, Brett; Wolfram, Catherine
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research; Washington University (WUSTL); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-5533
• DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjae003
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 1713-1766
• 关键词: FREE PRIMARY-EDUCATION; credit markets; moral hazard; CONTRACTS; debt; equilibria; default; access; POLICY

摘要

A new form of secured lending using digital collateral has recently emerged, most prominently in low- and middle-income countries. Digital collateral relies on lockout technology, which allows the lender to temporarily disable the flow value of the collateral to the borrower without physically repossessing it. We explore this new form of credit in a model and a field experiment using school-fee loans digitally secured with a solar home system. Securing a loan with digital collateral drastically reduced default rates (by 19 percentage points) and increased the lender's rate of return (by 49 percentage points). Using a variant of the methodology, we decompose the total effect on repayment and find that roughly two-thirds is attributable to moral hazard, and one-third to adverse selection. In addition, access to digitally secured school-fee loans significantly increased school enrollment and school-related expenditures without detrimental effects on households' balance sheets.