Sharing Risk to Avoid Tragedy: Informal Insurance and Irrigation in Village Economies

Karol Mazur

No 2020-19-02, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: I present a model of joint co-operation over irrigation and risk sharing in presence of limited commitment constraints. I estimate the model to the setting of three village economies in rural India. The implied dynamics are validated by non-targeted empirical evidence and show that if access to irrigation can be regulated by villagers, the two institutions reinforce each other. However, if ir¬rigation is non-excludable (as is the case with provision by central authorities), such investments harm local co-operation. Counterfactual experiments quan¬tify mutual reinforcement between the two institutions and gains attainable by replacing the government-owned irrigation.

Keywords: Risk Sharing; Limited Commitment; Informal Institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E20 O11 O12 O13 Q15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ebc8c3e2-36ea-4224-a4d6-f5a31825a625 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Sharing risk to avoid tragedy: Informal insurance and irrigation in village economies (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2020-19-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Coffey ().