Farmers face enormous production risks due to unpredictable rainfall, yet most do not have any formal insurance. One explanation for this is the existence of informal network-based risk sharing. Using a randomized controlled experiment, we study the demand for, and effects of, offering formal index-based rainfall insurance in an environment of tightly knit informal risk sharing networks: sub-ca...

BACKGROUND Against the achievement of nearly universal coverage for social health insurance for the elderly in China, a problem of inequity among different insurance schemes on health outcomes is still a big challenge for the health care system. Whether various health insurance schemes have divergent effects on health outcome is still a puzzle. Empirical evidence will be investigated in this st...

Why have insurance markets for many important risks failed to develop? Economic theory suggests this is most likely due to asymmetric information problems, but their presence is hard to identify empirically. In this paper I provide empirical estimates of information asymmetries in the insurance for crops, a market that has failed to develop for the most important types of natural hazards to cro...

This article uses panel data from 2000 to 2019 in the China Insurance Yearbook, Rural Statistical Yearbook and National Bureau of Statistics. Based on system generalized moment estimation model, influence density depth agricultural insurance at regional level upgrading optimization industrial structure is studied. The empirical results show that increase has a significant role promoting industr...

During the 2003-2006 period, subjective health status in Chinese rural areas improved. We used a unique household longitudinal survey to analyze how the introduction of a public insurance system has contributed to the change. This program is based on a doubly voluntary process: counties decide to launch, then households decide to subscribe. We disentangle two channels of influence of the insura...

OBJECTIVE To assess determinants of health care visits among children in a 12-county region of western North Carolina representative of rural areas in the United States. METHODS Households were randomly selected for surveys of household characteristics, health status, and health care use. Surveys were conducted June 1999 to January 2000 and were stratified for children younger than 5 years an...