Collaborative Research: Fingerprinting to Reduce Risky Borrowing

该研究将通过收集小额贷款借款人数字指纹技术的随机对照试验，量化改进借款人个人身份识别的影响。这种建立个人身份的替代方法将允许测试动态还款激励机制，其中包括对借款人的未来信贷准入进行调节。过去的还款表现。这项研究旨在衡量借款人的变化如何？偿还贷款的动机增加导致的行为会影响他们的利润、消费、投资和家庭福利。此外，本研究将通过衡量信贷员如何与客户互动、小额信贷机构如何调整其借款要求以及当地信贷的可得性，来检查贷款人如何应对新技术。将使用小额贷款机构的行政数据，结合对借款人和贷款人员的两年调查数据来衡量影响。我们的研究结果可以引导私人和非营利贷款机构自行采用指纹识别技术。此外，我们的研究结果可以帮助制定政府和世界银行等发展机构的政策，这些机构可以（例如）提供技术援助，帮助建立基于指纹的信用参考机构，从而进一步提高该技术的社会效益。我们实施了一项随机对照试验，涉及五家不同小额信贷机构的小额信贷客户和信贷员。信贷人员在筛选客户和执行贷款还款动态激励方面发挥着重要作用，在缺乏可靠方法识别新借款人或重复借款人的情况下，依靠他们的个人评估和对客户的了解。我们随机使用指纹技术来筛选借款人，并在信贷人员级别检查信用历史，按小额信贷机构分层。这种策略还会在特定地理区域内使用新技术的信贷人员比例上产生差异。我们使用这种变化来估计指纹对三种重要行为者的行为的影响：借款人本身、信贷人员和小额信贷机构。我们的主要估计将来自OLS回归，这是无偏的，因为信贷人员随机分配到指纹技术，但将包括地区和MFI（阶层）固定效应，以提高精度。在借款人层面，我们关注的是还款结果和家庭福利指标。在供给侧，我们衡量了信贷官员的时间分配和决策，看看他们是否重新分配了他们的精力来监控那些没有指纹的借款人，因此不受增加的还款激励的影响，并衡量了在广泛和密集的利润下获得信贷的决策的演变。我们使用指纹识别强度的区域差异来查看小额信贷机构是否将员工时间或可贷款资金重新分配到他们具有比较优势的地区（比市场上的竞争对手更容易获得指纹技术，比他们自己在其他市场上拥有更多的机会）。最终，本项目旨在通过研究借款人和贷款人的动态行为，以及衡量供给方对改进借款人识别的反应，加深我们对许多发展中国家普遍存在的信息不对称的影响的理解。这些问题的答案将提供一个更全面的画面，减少一种常见但迄今尚未得到充分研究的信息不对称类型的经济影响。

The research will quantify the impacts of improved personal identification of borrowers through a randomized controlled trial on technology to collect digital fingerprints of microloan borrowers. This alternative means of establishing personal identity, will allow for testing dynamic repayment incentives, which involve conditioning future credit access on a borrower?s past repayment performance. This study is designed to measure how changes in borrowers? behavior due to increased incentives to repay loans affect their profits, consumption, investment, and household wellbeing. In addition, this study will examine how lenders respond to the new technology, by measuring how loan officers interact with clients, how microfinance institutions adjust their borrowing requirements, and the local availability of credit. Impacts will be measured using administrative data from microlenders in combination with two years of survey data on borrowers and loan officers. Our results could lead private and non-profit lenders to adopt fingerprint identification technology of their own accord. In addition, our findings could help shape the policies of governments and of development institutions such as the World Bank, which could (for example) provide technical assistance to help foster the establishment of fingerprint-based credit reference bureaus that could further enhance the social benefits of the technology.We implement a randomized controlled trial involving microfinance customers and loan officers at five different microfinance instiutions. Credit officers play important roles in screening customers and enforcing dynamic incentives for loan repayment, and rely on their personal assessments and knowledge of customers in the absence of reliable ways to identify new or repeat borrowers. We randomize access to fingerprinting technology for screening borrowers and checking credit histories at the credit officer level, stratified by MFI. This strategy also generates variation in the fraction of credit officers in a given geographic area who are using the new technology. We use this variation to estimate the effect of fingerprinting on behaviors of three important sets of actors: borrowers themselves, credit officers, and MFIs. Our main estimates will come from OLS regressions, which are unbiased because of the random assignment of credit officers to the fingerprinting technology, but will include district and MFI (strata) fixed effects to improve precision. At the borrower level, we focus on repayment outcomes and on measures of household welfare. On the supply side, we measure the time allocation and decision-making of credit officers to see whether they reallocate their effort to monitoring borrowers who were not fingerprinted and are therefore not subject to increased repayment incentives, and to measure the evolution of decisions about access to credit at the extensive and intensive margins. We use the regional variation in the intensity of fingerprinting to see whether MFIs reallocate staff time or loanable funds to areas in which they have comparative advantages (more access to fingerprint technology than their competitors within the market, and more access than they themselves have in other markets). Ultimately, this project seeks to deepen our understanding of the impacts of a pervasive form of information asymmetry in many developing countries by studying dynamic behavior of borrowers and lenders, and measuring supply side responses to improved borrower identification. Answers to these questions will provide a fuller picture of the economic impacts of reducing a common but so far understudied type of information asymmetry.