Agricultural technology adoption is an important driver of rural poverty reduction. We study take-up of a specific technology: BARI-Mung 6 (BM6), an improved mung bean seed variety, among smallholder farmers in the southern region of Bangladesh. In contrast to agronomic studies on BM6...

Health shocks are among the most important unprotected risks for microfinance clients, but the take-up of micro health insurance typically remains limited. This paper attributes low enrollment rates to a social dilemma. Our theory is that in jointly liable groups, insurance is a public good....

Agricultural insurance has attracted considerable interest in recent years. Innovations in agricultural index insurance have raised expectations that the private sector can overcome shortcomings associated with more traditional indemnity-based products like multi-peril crop insurance, and...

A large body of literature suggests that consumers derive utility from gains and losses relative to a reference point. This paper shows that such reference dependence can affect savings in opposite directions depending on whether people face liquidity constraints. Existing models for wealth and...

Health shocks are among the most important unprotected risks for microfinance clients, but the take-up of micro health insurance typically remains limited. This paper attributes low enrolment rates to a social dilemma. Our theory is that in jointly liable groups, insurance is a public good....

Motivated by evidence of mental accounting, this paper tests whether the choice of when to be paid depends on the income type. A lab-in-the-field experiment in Kenya asked dairy cooperative members to allocate both their regular milk payments and an irregular windfall between two dates. We find...

Health insurance can protect consumption from health shocks, but it can also crowd out informal transfers. This paper examines whether health insurance improves consumption smoothing in the face of health shocks, and to what extent results depend on households' access to informal transfers as a...

An initial cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of the African Risk Capacity (ARC), published in 2013, showed that regional risk pooling for severe droughts could increase benefits to poor households by as much as US$ 1.90 per dollar invested, due to the speed, cost and targeting gains from improved risk...

Production risk is pervasive in agriculture, yet smallholder farmers lack access to quality insurance. This is due to asymmetric information in markets for indemnity insurance, and high basis risk, limited trust, and poor understanding of index-based insurance. Digital technologies can help...

Smallholder farmers in developing countries generally lack access to affordable agricultural insurance, in part because of high loss verification costs and asymmetric information in indemnity insurance and basis risk in index-based insurance. Advances in remote sensing and other digital...