This study analyzes efficiency of weather derivatives as primary insurance instruments for six crop reporting districts that are among the largest producers of corn, cotton, and soybeans in the United States. Specific weather derivatives are constructed for each crop/district combination based...

Financial intermediaries [FIs] in developing and emerging economies are poorly equipped to manage natural disasters. These events create losses for FIs, eroding capital reserves and compromising their ability to lend. Portfolio-level insurance against disasters can improve FI management of these...

We estimate the general-equilibrium labor market effects of a large-scale randomized intervention in which we designed and marketed a rainfall index insurance product across three states in India. Marketing agricultural insurance to both cultivators and to agricultural wage laborers allows us to...

This paper proposes and evaluates area index-based financial contracts for specific farm activities. These financial contracts allow not only for removing moral hazard and adverse selection as index insurances do, but also for adding more flexibility and, hence, better risk protection. The...

In the US forestry industry, wildre has always been one of the leading causes of damage. This topic is of growing interest as wildre has caused huge losses in recent years. Among all causes, lightning has always been the leading hazard. Unlike human related wildres for which timber owners may be...

Abstract This paper studies the interaction between index insurance market and the rural credit market by investigating how the availability of index insurance affects borrowers' moral hazard behavior. Among different types of moral hazard problem in the credit market, we focuses on credit...

We present a novel way to understand the low uptake of index insurance using the interlinked concepts of ambiguity and compound-lottery aversion. Noting that the presence of basis risk makes index insurance a compound lottery, we derive an expression of the willingness to pay (WTP) to eliminate...

This paper explores innovations in index-based risk transfer products (IBRTPs) as a means to address important insurance market imperfections that have precluded the emergence and sustainability of formal insurance markets in developing countries, where uninsured natural disaster risk remains a...

Replaced with revised version of paper 11/18/08.

Unpredictable rainfall is an important risk for agricultural activity, and farmers in developing countries often receive incomplete insurance from informal risk-sharing networks. We study the demand for, and effects of, offering formal index-based rainfall insurance through a randomized...