Informal Risk Sharing, Index Insurance and Risk-Taking in Developing Countries

By A. M. Mobarak, Mark R. Rosenzweig. 2013

252 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Preliminary findings are presented from a research project which examined the interactions between informal risk sharing, index insurance and risk-taking. Rainfall insurance contracts were randomly offered to cultivating and landless households in a set of Indian villages where preexisting census data on caste networks allowed the characterization of the nature and extent of informal risk sharing. We study how informal risk sharing mediates the demand for index insurance, whether index insurance or informal indemnification allows farmers to invest in risky technologies, and the general equilibrium effects of offering insurance contracts to cultivators and agricultural laborers.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c9bdbca62b0352f37d95f1373e80e8bb57990d54

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. G. Bryan
2. A. M. Mobarak
3. Shyamal K. Chowdhury

In Soil Science

1. G. Bryan
2. A. M. Mobarak
3. Shyamal K. Chowdhury

Citations in the corpus

• Underinvestment in a Profitable Technology: The Case of Seasonal Migration in Bangladesh (2014, background): “…The inability to experiment due to uninsured risk has been linked to biases towards low risk low-return technologies that stunt long-run growth (Mobarak and Rosenzweig 2013), and to reduced investments in agricultural inputs and technologies such as new high-yield variety seeds and…”