This study from Ghana found that index insurance lowers overall demand for agricultural loans while farmers appear to prefer micro-level insurance over meso‐level insurance. The study also shows that farmers are willing to pay to avoid basis risk.
The gains from insurance arise from the transfer of income across states. This paper shows that the transfer of gains from insurance across time can help explain low insurance demand, especially among the poor, with results from a randomized control trial on a crop insurance product in Kenya which removes it.
This article investigates the impact of insurance backed contingent credit on demand for credit and investment decisions using a framed field experiment conducted in rural Tanzania.
This study tests whether a new financial product that offers guaranteed credit access after a shock allows households to insure themselves against risk with a large-scale RCT involving 300,000 subjects in Bangladesh with one of the country’s largest microcredit institutions.
This paper asks whether a hybrid contract, which combines joint liability with an individual collateral requirement, could resolve tradeoffs between collateralized individual loans that exclude those who lack the requisite collateral assets or are unwilling to put them at risk and joint liability loans that are subject to moral hazard and freeriding.
This paper demonstrates that a contract based on satellite data combined with a second-stage conditional audit has the potential to improve index insurance quality.
This presentation describes the need for an objective minimum quality standard for index insurance to ensure that contracts don't leave farmers worse off for having purchased them, as well as a clear definition of index insurance quality.
This study used longitudinal household data to determine which factors affected demand for index based livestock insurance (IBLI). While both price and the non-price factors studied previously are indeed important, the findings indicate that basis risk and spatiotemporal adverse selection also play a major role in determining demand for IBLI.
This paper builds a multi-generation household model of consumption, accumulation, and risk management to assess the dynamic consequences of climate risk exposure. The analysis shows the long-term level and depth of poverty can be improved by incorporating ‘vulnerability-targeted social protection’ into a conventional social protection system.
In this presentation for the 13th International Microinsurance Conference in Lima, Peru on November 9, 2017, AMA Innovation Lab assistant director Tara Chiu discussed the proven impacts index insurance can have on small-scale farmers in developing economies and the importance of ensuring that only quality products are made available on the market.
