Weather Index Insurance and Common Property Resources

Displacement and Alienation from Common Property Resources

Contributions of Agricultural Systems Modeling to Weather Index Insurance

Climate exerts a profound influence on the lives of rural populations, particularly the rural poor, who depend on agriculture for livelihood and sustenance, who are unprotected against climate-related diseases, who lack secure access to water and food, and who are vulnerable to hydrometeorological hazard. Climate shocks such as drought and flooding lead not only to loss of life, but also long-t...

Social Opinion and the Use of Common Property Resources∗

Public opinion formation plays a very important role in economic policy development. Opinions put forward in various social platforms offered by the media and the Internet have a large impact on international treaty negotiations. In particular this seems to be the case for international negotiations regarding the abatement of greenhouse gasses. In this paper we argue that social opinion formati...

Ambiguity, Social Opinion and the Use of Common Property Resources∗

In this paper we argue that ambiguity, combined with social opinion formation, can be used as the foundation of a game-theoretic equilibrium concept that transcends the standard Nash equilibrium concept, applied to a model of the tragedy of the commons. Our approach sheds light on the international environmental crisis and the relevant ongoing international negotiations. We conclude that social...

Weather Insurance Savings Accounts

Better insurance against rainfall risk could improve the security of hundreds of millions of agricultural households around the world. This paper theoretically and experimentally analyzes an innovative financial product called a Weather Insurance Savings Account (WISA), which combines savings and rainfall insurance. We index the insurance share of the WISA by γ ∈ [0, 1] and use a standard model...