Weather is a key source of income risk for many firms and households, particularly in emerging market economies. This paper uses a randomized controlled trial approach to study how an innovative risk management instrument for hedging rainfall risk affects production decisions among a sample of...

The adoption of new agricultural technologies may be discouraged because of their inherent riskiness. This study implemented a randomized field experiment to ask whether the provision of insurance against a major source of production risk induces farmers to take out loans to invest in a new crop...

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? This paper uses a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. The analysis...

Using 40 years of historical rainfall data, this paper estimates a distribution for payouts on rainfall insurance policies offered to farmers in the State of Andhra Pradesh, India, in 2006. The authors find that the contracts primarily protect households against extreme tail events; half the...

Rainfall index insurance provides a payout based on measured local rainfall during key phases of the agricultural season, and in principle can help rural households diversify a key source of idiosyncratic risk. This paper describes basic features of rainfall insurance contracts offered in India...

How do borrowers respond to improvements in a lender's ability to punish defaulters? This paper reports the results of a randomized field experiment in rural Malawi that examines the impact of fingerprinting borrowers in a context where a unique identification system is absent. Fingerprinting...

This paper reports the results of a field experiment that randomly assigned smallholder cash crop farmers formal savings accounts. In collaboration with a microfinance institution in Malawi, the authors tested two primary treatments, offering either: 1)"ordinary"accounts, or 2) both ordinary...

This paper studies the credit market implications and real effects of one the largest borrower bailout programs in history, enacted by the government of India against the backdrop of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. The study finds that the stimulus program had no effect on productivity, wages,...

The very poor in developing countries often make intertemporal choices that seem at odds with their individual self-interest. There are many possible reasons why. This paper investigates several of these reasons with a lab-in-the-field experiment in rural Malawi involving large stakes. It makes...

Female entrepreneurship is low in many developing economies partly because of constraints on women's time and mobility, which are often reinforced by social norms. This paper analyzes a marketing experiment designed to encourage women to adopt a new microcredit product. A brochure with the same...