This paper focuses on multiple financial market failures – emphasising its heretofore underappreciated testable implications, including specific behaviours that are rational only in the presence of a poverty trap.
This paper discusses an innovative index insurance contract the research team developed for Malian cotton producers, whose harvests are highly variable.
This paper considers poverty dynamics in a typical setting by calibrating the model to the northern Kenyan rangelands, where evidence of a poverty trap exists and pastoralists have the opportunity to insure livestock against drought losses.
Social programs began on the notion that their beneficiaries will change some behavior (perhaps due to improved incentives or new knowledge gained during the intervention) pose unique challenges for impact evaluation. Nevertheless, it is difficult to determine when the treatment and control groups should be compared, i.e. when the program in question should be evaluated. This papers explores challenges revolving around these issues.
This paper fleshes out observations of approaches to offering index insurance and proposes that the next generation of index insurance contracts be designed for development impact.
Relying on a randomized rollout strategy, this paper reports the results of a multi-year impact evaluation that spanned the 5-year life of the program.
This presentation took place at Rome, Italy on June 13, 2012 discussing the comparisons between contracts being linear or in lump sum for farmers once preference parameters are considered.
This presentation took place in Lima, Peru on July 11, 2011 and explores the benefits of better public and private sector organization in efforts exploring index insurance.