The study was conducted in Assosa district of Benishangul-Gumuz regional state, western Ethiopia, to assess major farm enterprises, agricultural risks and demand for micro-insurance services. Two peasant associations namely, Selga-23 and Kushmengel were selected to represent settler and native farming communities, respectively. Using simple randomized techniques, 86 respondents were selected fo...

This article examines health insurance coverage among a group of newly entitled disability insurance beneficiaries. Although only 50 percent of the beneficiaries had been entitled to disability benefits long enough to be eligible for Medicare coverage, a full 86 percent of them had some type of health coverage. Excluding coverage by Medicare, nearly 75 percent of the sample had coverage under o...

Crop insurance is an appropriate way to overcome the risk in agricultural production sector and increase farmer’s peace of mind for their future income. In the agricultural sector of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer Ahmad, the risk of production is high due to the substantial losses of crops and other diseases and so is the income risk. Since most local farmers have low incomes and livelihoods, natural dis...

We examine the demand for risk classification insurance with fuzzy private information using an expected utility set-up. We first demonstrate that standard assumptions on private information cannot explain the observed demand for risk classification insurance. By allowing for fuzzy heterogeneous private information, we show that a unique equilibrium exists that can be of the form that some of t...

We study the political economy of social insurance with double heterogeneity of voters (i.e., different income and risk levels). Social insurance is financed through distortionary taxation and redistributes across income and risks. Individuals vote over the extent of social insurance, which they can complement on the private market. Private insurance suffers from adverse selection which results...

Health insurance is potentially subject to risk selection, i.e. adverse selection on the part of consumers and cream skimming on the part of insurers. Adverse selection models predict that competitive health insurers can eschew high-risk individuals by o¤ering contracts with low deductibles or copayment rates, while attracting low-risk individuals with higher copayments, resulting in a separati...

We study the effect of offering index insurance to groups versus individuals on individual’s savings and insurance decisions in a lab experiment in the field, which offers real index insurance. We also look at how the network relationships among dairy farmers in the Dominican Republics affects the demand for group index insurance. Individuals offered group insurance are exogenously grouped acco...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 requires states to establish healthcare insurance exchanges by 2014 to facilitate the purchase of qualified health plans. States are required to establish exchanges for small businesses and individuals. A federally operated exchange will be established, and states failing to participate in any other exchanges will be mandated to join the fe...

We investigate whether people enrolled into voluntary health insurance (VHI) substitute public consumption with private (opt out) or just enlarge their private consumption, without reducing reliance upon public provisions (top up). We study the case of Italy, where a mixed insurance system is in place. To this purpose, we specify a joint model for public and private specialist visits counts, an...