This paper describes the contract design and institutional features of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered … to smallholder farmers in rural India and presents preliminary evidence on the determinants of insurance participation …. Insurance take-up is found to be decreasing in basis risk between insurance payouts and income fluctuations, higher among …

insurance product designed to compensate low-income Indian farmers in the event of insufficient rainfall during the primary … purchase the insurance, even though they overwhelmingly cite rainfall variability as their most significant source of risk. We … then conduct a series of randomized field experiments to test theories of why product adoption is so low. Insurance …

participation in a mutual loss pool and an explicit, priced government insurance mechanism. We also discuss how these principles and …

demand estimation. Our semiparametic approach models expenditures simultaneously with the choice of insurance plan and the … of insurance exogeneity, but are insensitive to the assumptions governing the decision to incur any expenditures. The … general emphasis in the health economics literature on sample selection instead of insurance endogeneity therefore seems …