Insurance and Rural Welfare

Insurance and Rural Welfare

Insurance and Rural Welfare: What Can Panel Data Tell Us?

Running title: Insurance and rural welfare Abstract: Assessing the scope for insurance in rural communities usually requires a structural model of household behavior under risk. One of the few empirical applications of such models is the study by Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1993) who conclude that Indian farmers in the ICRISAT villages would not benefit from the introduction of formal weather insura...

Risk, Inequality, Insurance, and Welfare

This paper weighs in on the ongoing debate over the appropriate balance between efficiency and equity. I explore the relationship between our attitudes about risk and our beliefs about distributive justice. The notion that there is a deep relationship between risk and inequality is not a new one; discussions of the topic date at least from Harsanyi’s work on the subject in the 1950s. Harsanyi a...

The impact of welfare reform on health insurance coverage in rural areas.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (PRWOA, often simply called “welfare reform”) led to profound changes in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, which was renamed the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program in the process. Those changes included removing millions of persons from eligibility for direct public assistance, which in pre...

Alternative health insurance schemes: a welfare comparison.

In this paper, we present a simple model of health insurance with asymmetric information, where we compare two alternative ways of organizing the insurance market. Either as a competitive insurance market, where some risks remain uninsured, or as a compulsory scheme, where however, the level of reimbursement of loss is to be determined by majority decision. In a simple welfare comparison, the c...