Much has been written on the determinants of technology adoption in agriculture, with issues such as input availability, knowledge and education, risk preferences, profitability, and credit constraints receiving much attention. This paper focuses on a factor that has been less well documented:...

We show theoretically that the presence of basis risk in index insurance makes it a complement to informal risk sharing, implying that index insurance crowds-in risk sharing and leading to a prediction that demand will be higher among groups of individuals that can share risk. We report results...

We use a principal–agent framework and data from the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey between 1994 and 2004 to understand biases in the distribution of food aid in Ethiopia. We show that even when aid is systematically misallocated, aid recipients may match official classifications of needy...