The Effect of Microinsurance on Economic Activities: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

Hongbin Cai (), Yuyu Chen, Hanming Fang and Li-An Zhou

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2015, vol. 97, issue 2, 287-300

Abstract: We report results from a large, randomized field to study how access to formal microinsurance affects production and economic development. We induce exogenous variation in insurance coverage at the village level by randomly assigning performance incentives to the village animal husbandry worker who is responsible for signing farmers up for the insurance. We find that promoting greater adoption of insurance significantly increases farmers' sow production, and this effect seems to persist in the longer run; moreover, the increase in sow production in response to the sow insurance does not seem to be the result of the substitution of other livestock. © 2015 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Keywords: microinsurance; economic development; exogenous; animal husbandry; sow production (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I30 I38 Q10 Q19 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (59)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00476 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:tpr:restat:v:97:y:2015:i:2:p:287-300

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().