Inventory Credit as a Commitment Device to Save Grain Until the Hunger Season
Tristan Le Cotty,
E Maître d’Hôtel,
Raphael Soubeyran and
Julie Subervie
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Elodie Maitre D'Hotel
American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2019, vol. 101, issue 4, 1115-1139
Abstract:
In January 2013, we collected data from 653 farmers in Burkina Faso, who were asked hypothetical questions about risk aversion and time discounting. Ten months later, these farmers were offered the opportunity to participate in an inventory credit system, also called warrantage, in which they receive a loan in exchange for storing a portion of their harvest as a physical guarantee in one of the newly-built warehouses of the program. We found that a significant number of farmers chose to store grain in the warehouse without taking the maximum amount allowed for a loan in return, and that farmers who exhibit a stronger present bias were significantly more likely to participate in the warrantage system than other, otherwise similar, farmers. We interpret these results as evidence that farmers use warrantage as a means to commit to saving a portion of their crop until the lean season. These results are in line with the main predictions of our theoretical model, which explicitly takes the hyperbolic nature of farmers’ time preferences into account.
Keywords: Commitment savings; inventory credit; hyperbolic discounting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ajae/aaz009 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
Working Paper: Inventory credit as a commitment device to save grain until the hunger season (2019) 
Working Paper: Inventory credit as a commitment device to save grain until the hunger season (2018) 
Working Paper: Inventory credit as a commitment device to save grain until the hunger season (2018) 
Working Paper: Inventory credit as a commitment device to save grain until the hunger season (2018) 
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:oup:ajagec:v:101:y:2019:i:4:p:1115-1139.
Access Statistics for this article
American Journal of Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Madhu Khanna, Brian E. Roe, James Vercammen and JunJie Wu
More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().