Microinsurance adoption in developing countries is low, despite its potential to foster economic growth. Recent research is not able to explain the low take-up rates within the neoclassical framework. I contribute to this stream of research by proposing rational as well as boundedly rational...

In a neoclassical framework risk averse agents ask for full insurance coverage if the premium is actuarially fair. Recent empirical observations of the demand for index-based weather insurance in developing countries reveal the opposite: the more risk averse farmers are, the less they buy...

The paper investigates whether, as is often suggested by the literature, diversification towards the non-agricultural sector is considered as a risk- mitigating strategy by rural Pakistani households. This issue has already been addressed but usually as an ex post mechanism, i.e. smoothing...

This study extends the recent debate on the rate of return on cattle rearing in India, triggered by Anagol, Etang, and Karlan (2017) and followed by others, to the Bangladeshi context and finds that the apparent paradox of widespread cattle rearing despite negative returns in India is absent in...

In this paper we focus on the timing of marriages of women, whose marriages are associated with bride wealth payments, which are transfers from (the family of) the groom to the bride's family. Unmarried daughters could therefore be considered assets who, at times of need, can be cashed in. We...

In this paper we focus on the timing of marriages of women, whose marriages are associated with bride wealth payments, which are transfers from (the family of) the groom to the bride's family. Unmarried daughters could therefore be considered assets who, at times of need, can be cashed in. We...

The changing social, financial and regulatory frameworks, such as an increasingly aging society, the current low interest rate environment, as well as the implementation of Solvency II, lead to the search for new product forms for private pension provision. In order to address the various...

In fifteen European countries, China, and the US, stocks and business equity as a share of total household assets are represented by an increasing and convex function of income/wealth. A parsimonious model fitted to the data shows why background labor-income risk can explain much of this...

We study how background health risk affects financial risk-taking. We elicit financial risk-taking behavior of a representative sample of more than 5,000 Germans in five panel waves during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploiting variation in local infections across time and space, we find that an...