Can informal insurance patch the safety net

The overall objective of this research is to identify vulnerable groups of households at risk, assess their needs for social protection and actual achievements of the current system of protection for … Expand. Gender And Development. Trust … Expand. Chapter 8. Child Growth in the Time of Drought.

This paper examines the impact of rainfall shocks on a measure of child health, growth in height, drawing on a unique household panel data set from rural Zimbabwe. We find that children aged 12 to 24 … Expand.

In this paper, we examine empirically whether risk pooling is more advantageous among altruistic compared to selfish agents in a framework where individuals cannot make binding commitments. In … Expand. Sovereign Debt as Intertemporal Barter. Borrowing and lending between sovereign parties is modeled as intertemporal barter that smoothes the consumption of a risk-averse party subject to endowment shocks. The surplus anticipated in the … Expand.

There are several sensible reasons why households cannot fully insure consumption against income … Expand. Highly Influential. View 1 excerpt. Private interhousehold cash transfers are an important source of income in many developing countries. Among the countries whose experience is reviewed in the article, the proportion of all households … Expand. View 1 excerpt, references background. Hypotheses concerning the relationship between insurance-based inco me transfers and the membership, size, and composition of households in low-income agricultural environments facing … Expand.

View 5 excerpts, references background. Private, inter-household income transfers in the Philippines are large and widespread.

They are responsive to the economic status of households. Transfers are targeted to households headed by the … Expand. Are the Poor Less Well-Insured? The authors test how well consumption is insured against income risk in a panel of sampled households in rural China. They estimate the risk insurance models by Generalized Method of Moments, … Expand. A Simple Test of Consumption Insurance. Are consumers effectively insured against idiosyncratic shocks to income or wealth, either by formal institutions such as charities, private insurance, and government programs or by informal … Expand.

The hypothesis of full risk sharing can be taken to data from low-income countries and evaluate formal and informal financial systems. In many contexts, idiosyncratic risks are high, so … Expand. Sign In. Advanced Search. Search Menu. Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Volume Jonathan Morduch Jonathan Morduch. The author is grateful for comments from Harold Alderman, Angus Deaton, and the journal's referees.

This work was supported by the Africa Department of the World Bank. The first draft was completed while a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the revision was completed with support from the John D.

MacArthur Foundation. These events remind observers of a reality hidden in official poverty statistics: that the condition of poverty is linked closely to vulnerability. Many poor households are exposed regularly to risks from illness, harsh weather, political instability, and economic mismanagement. Concern with vulnerability may be both intrinsic and tied to implications for income generation as well as to the longer-term consequences for the health and education of children Jacoby and Skoufias ; Hoddinott and Kinsey ; Rose Rosenzweig and Binswanger , for example, use data from rural South India to show that an increase in risk as measured by an increase of one standard deviation in the coefficient of variation of the.