Risk-Sharing in Village Economies Revisited

Tobias Broer and Tessa Bold

No 11143, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: The limited commitment model is popular for the analysis of village risk-sharing as it captures both the observed partial character of insurance and the presumption that incomes are well observed but formal contracts absent in rural communities. We study dynamic limited commitment when individuals can form new, smaller coalitions after reneging in a larger group, which makes group size an endogenous outcome of the model. This is important for theoretical consistency, but also because we show that enforcement constraints, which typically bind only in case of positive income shocks, counterfactually imply a stronger response of consumption to income increases than to income losses in village-size insurance groups. In small groups, in contrast, the response of consumption to income increases and declines is symmetric. The results show how equilibrium group sizes are much smaller than the typical village, bringing the predicted consumption process in line with the data. We thus argue that allowing for endogenous group formation in the dynamic limited commitment model strongly improves its predictive power for analyzing risk-sharing in village economies.

Keywords: Risk-sharing; Village economies; Informal insurance; Dynamic limited commitment; Renegotiation-proofness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D11 D12 D52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11143 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Risk-Sharing in Village Economies Revisited (2015)
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:cpr:ceprdp:11143

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11143

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().