We study informal insurance within communities, explicitly recognizing the possibility that subgroups of individuals may destabilize insurance arrangements among the larger group. We therefore consider self-enforcing risk-sharing agreements that are robust not only to single-person deviations...

Achieving peace and building the institutions that will make it last require much time and effort on the part of adversaries. While making this effort, the likelihood of peace is uncertain and preparations for conflict are on-going. We examine a setting that takes such considerations into...

This paper proposes measures of income risk that households face, and of the extent of insurance effectively delivered by the various coping mechanisms those households use to minimize the consequence of that risk by (1) contrasting the expected utility of consumption an individual has with the...