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...

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...

Weather insurance is a financial instrument proposed to increase coverage of unprotected weather shocks in developing countries. Structuring sales as group-based products has been argued as a strategy to increase the attractiveness of index insurance, raising the question as to what impacts...

Games are particularly relevant for field research in agriculture, where alternative experimental designs can be costly and unfeasible. Games are also popular for non-experimental purposes such as recreating learning experiences and facilitating dialogue with local communities. After a...

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...

We explore potential effects of index based insurance on common property resources, assessing its impacts on the animal stocking decisions of pastoralists and the resulting impact on a common property pasture. We find a range of potential outcomes. Although index insurance has the capability of...

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...

We study dynamic markets where product safety is unobserved by consumers. Perfect, but costly, audits and an exogenous noisy signal can provide information regarding seller type. Without the noisy signal, sellers do not disclose product safety without auditing. If audits are too expensive, a...