 Digital Collateral*Paul Gertler, Brett Green and Catherine Wolfram The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2024, vol. 139, issue 3, 1713-1766 Abstract: 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 Karlan and Zinman (2009) 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. Date: 2024 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:139:y:2024:i:3:p:1713-1766. Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College |
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