The research team estimates the general-equilibrium labor market effects of a large-scale randomized intervention designed and markets a rainfall index insurance product across three states in India.  Marketing agricultural insurance to both cultivators and to agricultural wage laborers allows the team to test a general-equilibrium model of wage determination in settings where households supplying labor and households hiring labor face weather risk.

This presentation was by Maria Rarieya from the International Centre for Evaluation and Development (ICED) on May 24, 2017 describing the benefits of using index-based insurance over costly traditional claims-based insurance.

While index insurance offers a compelling solution to the problem of covariant risk among smallholder farmers in developing countries, most weather based contracts suffer from poor quality due to a low correlation between the index and farmer losses. This paper proposes and analyzes an alternative index insurance contract, which combines a satellite based index with the potential for a second-stage audit.

To cope with shocks, poor households with inadequate access to financial markets can sell assets to smooth consumption and ,or reduce consumption to protect assets. Utilizing data from an RCT in Kenya, this paper estimates that on average an innovative microinsurance scheme reduces both forms of costly coping.

This presentation took place at the University of California, Davis on January 23, 2017 describing seed and insurance technology risk management in West Africa.

Increasing agricultural efficiency via technology adoption remains a high priority among development practitioners. One potential tool for furthering this objective is using drought index insurance to increase access to credit.

Social protection programs are designed to help vulnerable populations—including pastoralists—maintain a basic level of wellbeing, manage risk, and cope with negative shocks. The research team uses evidence-based to understand the poverty dynamics in the pastoralist-based economy of northern Kenya’s arid and semi arid lands as a case study to discuss and compare the observed impacts of two different social protection schemes on heterogeneous pastoralist households.

In discussing the paradoxical violation of expected utility theory that now bears his name, Maurice Allais noted that people tend to “greatly value,” or overweight, outcomes that are certain. Digging deeper, the Principal Investigator draws on the more recent work of Andreoni and Sprenger on a Discontinuous Preference for Certainty and show that that impact of the rebate framing on willingness to pay for insurance is driven by individuals who exhibit a well defined discontinuous preference for certainty.

The research team describes the methodology used to design the contract and its underlying index of predicted area-average livestock mortality in Index-based Livestock Insurance. The Principal Investigator describes the contract pricing and the risk exposures of the underwriter to establish IBLI’s reinsurability on international markets.