This paper examines whether agricultural insurance can boost investment by small scale farmers in West Africa. We conduct a randomized evaluation to analyze the impacts of index insurance for cotton farmers in Burkina Faso. We find no impact of insurance on cotton, but, consistent with...

The material contained herein is supplementary to the article named in the title and published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Volume 89, Number 4, November 2007.

Summary This paper examines why farm households seek informal loans in Piura, Peru, where formal lenders offer loans at lower interest rates. A panel data econometric analysis reveals that the informal sector serves various types of clients: households excluded from the formal sector but also...

We develop a model of sorting and matching between borrowers and lenders across formal and informal credit markets in a developing country context. We highlight the role of risk both on credit access and sectoral choice. We examine how activity and sectoral choice vary across agents with...

We analyze the individualization of farm units in Mali in the sense of a transformation of purely collective farms into mixed units in which private plots coexist with collective fields. Since a moral-hazard-in-team problem plagues production on the latter and the household head extracts his...

As in the case of agricultural cooperatives, collective fields in extended agricultural households act as an insurance device, by redistributing income between household members. At the same time they entail inefficiencies arising from the incentives to free ride on co-workers efforts....