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.

A Randomized Control Trial introduced sorghum farmers in Burkina Faso to a technology for applying small amounts of fertilizer at the time of planting, and provided a randomly assigned subset of farmers with free kits comprised of mineral fertilizer and improved seed. Results show that a targeted approach is much more effective in encouraging broader adoption in the longterm. 

A set of RCTs in Tanzania tested the impact of a telephone directory on business and agricultural households. Enterprises saw large increases in calls and mobile money. Households increased search activities and the use of mobile phones for business, with some evidence of improved farming outcomes.