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 pp) and increased the lender’s rate of return (by 49 pp). Employing 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 is attributable 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.

中文翻译：

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数字抵押品

最近出现了一种使用“数字抵押品”的新型担保贷款，尤其是在低收入和中等收入国家。数字抵押品依赖于锁定技术，该技术允许贷方暂时禁用抵押品对借款人的流动价值，而无需实际收回抵押品。我们在模型和现场实验中探索了这种新的信贷形式，使用由太阳能家庭系统提供数字担保的学费贷款。使用数字抵押品担保贷款大幅降低了违约率（降低了 19 个百分点），并提高了贷方的回报率（提高了 49 个百分点）。采用卡兰和津曼（2009）方法的变体，我们分解了对还款的总影响，发现大约三分之二可归因于道德风险，三分之一可归因于逆向选择。此外，获得数字担保的学费贷款显着增加了入学率和与学校相关的支出，而不会对家庭的资产负债表产生不利影响。