A major challenge in addressing climate risk in developing countries is that many regions do not have the necessary historical weather data to design and validate solutions using technologies such as remote sensing. Therefore, many projects are build using farmer's reported perceptions and...

There is evidence that asymmetric information in the housing market between sellers and buyers is an important source of mispricing, especially when involving out-of-town buyers (Chinco and Mayer 2016, Kurlat and Stroebel 2015). In this paper we show that a specific cognitive bias, the...

The objective of this paper is to frame the key issues and summarize the current state of knowledge about and innovations in index-based risk transfer products (IBRTPs) as they relate to the management of climate risk for poverty reduction, especially of chronic or persistent poverty. In the...

Are disaster outcomes the sole function of the weather, or do human actions play a role? Many assume that human dynamics matter, but this has not been tested. We utilize the exogenous nature of storm hazards and knowledge of pre-event preparedness by day-of-week to test if there is a connection...

Ground-truthed community-based information over time and space can improve the design of climate risk instruments, reducing the mismatch between farmers' reported events and remote sensing datasets. However, increasing constraints on direct interaction and a lack of incentives for rural...

Climate variability poses a severe threat to subsistence farmers in southern Africa. Two different approaches have emerged in recent years to address these threats: the use of seasonal precipitation forecasts for risk reduction (for example, choosing seed varieties that can perform well for...