Essays on Agricultural Microinsurance.
详细信息
文摘
Uninsured risk is a serious impediment to poverty alleviation efforts in developing countries. This effect can be especially troubling among the poorest,most vulnerable households: uninsured risk can keep such households poor by inducing suboptimal decision-making and forgone income. In this context,formal insurance contracts appear to be promising and might improve the welfare of poor households in developing countries. Despite the availability of formal agricultural microinsurance in some pilot projects in some countries,the uptake of formal insurance has been unexpectedly low,which limits the welfare impacts of these financial tools. This dissertation is broadly motivated by the need for a better understanding of the constraints of the uptake of insurance and their potential impacts. After the first chapter introduces the work,the second chapter empirically examines the impact of an agricultural insurance intervention among cotton producers in Mali. This chapter shows that insurance can have a significant impact on the ex-ante behaviors of households that perceive the product as reducing their risk exposure. Households that bought the insurance contracts and believed that the contracts reduced production risk increased their investments in cotton production. At the extensive margin,these insured households significantly increased their share of land devoted to cotton production - their main source of cash - by 85%. At the intensive margin,average input use per hectare increased by 135% relative to that of their counterparts. The third chapter studies constraints on the uptake of microinsurance. The literature on the uptake of microinsurance hinges on the implicit assumption of statistical sophistication imposed by the classical model of decision-making under uncertainty. According to this assumption,a decision maker is indifferent between a compound-lottery and a statistically equivalent simple lottery. The first essay uses insights from psychology to show that the statistical sophistication assumption overestimates the desirability of microinsurance. The approach of this first essay is primarily theoretical and draws on the related literatures on ambiguity and compound-risk aversion. However,the essay is backed by empirical support generated by artefactual field experiments in Mali. The findings of this chapter suggest that farmers perceptions of the agricultural microinsurance contract justify the proposal for an alternative approach to designing insurance contracts. By increasing insurance uptake,these new kinds of contracts would have greater impacts on poor and rural populations in the developing world. The fourth chapter studies the determinants of the demand for agricultural microinsurance in Mali. The approach of this chapter is empirical. An economic experiment and household survey conducted in Bougouni,Mali,provide the data for this empirical analysis. This chapter supports the hypothesis that compound-risk aversion decreases the uptake of insurance. It also shows that the demand for insurance is highly sensitive to price changes. More importantly,farmers are most sensitive to changes in the contract characteristics with which they are most familiar. The essay discusses implications for the marketing of microinsurance contracts.