Do Index Insurance Programs Live Up to Their Promises? Aggregating Evidence from Multiple Experiments

Despite limited uptake, index insurance is often seen as one of the most remarkable innovations of the past decades to help smallholder farmers manage risks and boost their productive investments. In this paper, we use a Bayesian hierarchical model to aggregate evidence from six experiments and assess the external validity of their results. We find positive but highly heterogeneous effects across experiments. On average, interventions expanding access to index insurance increase productive investments by 0.06-0.12 SD. However, treatment effects display substantial heterogeneity and there is no evidence that this heterogeneity can be explained by basic, pre-registered household characteristics. We conclude that the existing evidence base offers limited insights to predict effects in new settings, and that policymakers should be cautious before investing in the widespread promotion of index insurance