Temporary Migration and Endogenous Risk Sharing in Village India

By Melanie Morten. Journal of Political Economy, 2019

198 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When people can self-insure via migration, they may have less need for informal risk sharing. At the same time, informal insurance may reduce the need to migrate. To understand the joint determination of migration and risk sharing, I study a dynamic model of risk sharing with limited commitment frictions and endogenous temporary migration. First, I characterize the model. Second, I structurally estimate the model using the new ICRISAT panel from rural India. Third, I introduce a rural employment scheme. The policy reduces migration and decreases risk sharing, lowering the welfare gain of the policy.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/071a08fd294ea8dfae8d4d64bfd237c9ca104d71

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Forhad Shilpi
2. David Lagakos
3. Alessandra Voena
4. A. M. Mobarak
5. Mike Waugh
6. L. Corno
7. N. Hildebrandt
8. H. Selod

In Safety Research

1. David Lagakos
2. Forhad Shilpi
3. H. Selod
4. Mike Waugh
5. Alessandra Voena
6. A. M. Mobarak
7. L. Corno
8. N. Hildebrandt

In Soil Science

1. Forhad Shilpi
2. David Lagakos
3. Alessandra Voena
4. A. M. Mobarak
5. L. Corno
6. N. Hildebrandt
7. H. Selod

Citations in the corpus

• The Welfare Effects of Encouraging Rural-Urban Migration (2018, background): “…of factors of production across firms, sectors or regions within an economy may underlie these TFP differences.1 One potentially large source of misallocation is an inefficient distribution of workers across space (see e.g. Bryan and Morten, 2019; McMillan and Rodrik, 2011; Vollrath, 2009).”
• Age of Marriage, Weather Shocks, and the Direction of Marriage Payments (2020, background): “Indeed, we have found that risk aversion between 1 and 1.5 above to be most common in the development and labor economics literature (Rosenzweig and Wolpin, 1993; Attanasio and Weber, 1995; Gourinchas and Parker, 2002; Morten, 2019).”
• Rural-Urban Migration in Developing Countries: Lessons from the Literature (2021, background): “Bryan and Morten (2019) estimate the aggregate productivity gains from reducing barriers to internal labor migration in Indonesia, accounting for worker selection and spatial differences in human capital.”