Migration and Informal Insurance

Food Aid and Informal Insurance

Households in developing countries use a variety of informal mechanisms to cope with risk, including mutual support and risk-sharing. These mechanisms cannot avoid that they remain vulnerable to shocks. Public programs in the form of food aid distribution and food-for-work programs are meant to protect vulnerable households from consumption and nutrition downturns by providing a safety net. In ...

Endogenous insurance and informal relationships

Heterogeneously risk-averse individuals who lack access to formal insurance build and use relationships with each other to manage risk. I show that the composition of equilibrium relationships under pairwise matching and when group size is endogenous is determined by a mean-variance trade-o¤ across di¤erentially risky productive opportunities, though output distributions may have in…nitely-many...

Informal insurance in social networks

This paper studies bilateral insurance schemes across networks of individuals. While transfers are based on social norms, each individual must have the incentive to abide by those norms, and so we investigate the structure of self-enforcing insurance networks. Network links play two distinct and possibly conflictual roles. First, they act as conduits for transfers. Second, they act as conduits ...

Informal insurance, public transfers and consumption smoothing

In many developing countries, public programs in the form of food aid distribution and food-for-work programs are often meant to protect vulnerable households from consumption and nutrition downturns by providing a safety net. Few studies have evaluated the impact of these programs. Furthermore, households often use a variety of informal mechanisms to cope with risk, including mutual support an...

Informal Insurance, Enforcement Constraints, and Group Formation