Coping with shocks: the impact of Self-Help Groups on migration and food security

Timothée Demont

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper asks whether local savings and credit associations help poor rural households hit by climatic shocks. Combining data from an original field experiment with meteorological data, I investigate how Self-Help Groups (SHGs) allow households to cope with rainfall shocks in villages of East India over a sevenyear period. I show that SHGs withstand large rainfall shocks remarkably, and that credit flows are very stable in treated villages. As a result, treated households experience a higher food security during the lean season following a drought and increase seasonal migration to mitigate future income shocks. These results imply that small-scale financial institutions like SHGs help to finance temporary risk management strategies and to cope with important covariate income shocks such as droughts.

Keywords: microfinance; weather shocks; risk management; seasonal migration; food security (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-mfd
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Working Paper: Coping with shocks: the impact of Self-Help Groups on migration and food security (2020)
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