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Insurance, credit, and technology adoption : field experimental evidence from Malawi

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Author Info
Gine, Xavier
Yang, Dean

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Abstract

The adoption of new agricultural technologies may be discouraged because of their inherent riskiness. This study implemented a randomized field experiment to ask whether the provision of insurance against a major source of production risk induces farmers to take out loans to invest in a new crop variety. The study sample was composed of roughly 800 maize and groundnut farmers in Malawi, where by far the dominant source of production risk is the level of rainfall. We randomly selected half of the farmers to be offered credit to purchase high-yielding hybrid maize and improved groundnut seeds for planting in the November 2006 crop season. The other half of the farmers were offered a similar credit package but were also required to purchase (at actuarially fair rates) a weather insurance policy that partially or fully forgave the loan in the event of poor rainfall. Surprisingly, take up was lower by 13 percentage points among farmers offered insurance with the loan. Take-up was 33.0 percent for farmers who were offered the uninsured loan. There is suggestive evidence that the reduced take-up of the insured loan was due to the high cognitive cost of evaluating the insurance: insured loan take-up was positively correlated with farmer education levels. By contrast, the take-up of the uninsured loan was uncorrelated with farmer education.

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Paper provided by The World Bank in its series Policy Research Working Paper Series with number 4425.

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Date of creation: 01 Dec 2007
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Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4425

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Keywords: ; Access to Finance; Debt Markets; Hazard Risk Management; Crops&Crop Management Systems;

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    Other versions:
  3. Simtowe, Franklin & Zeller, Manfred, 2006. "The Impact of Access to Credit on the Adoption of hybrid maize in Malawi: An Empirical test of an Agricultural Household Model under credit market failure," MPRA Paper 45, University Library of Munich, Germany. [Downloadable!]
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  4. Foster, Andrew D & Rosenzweig, Mark R, 1995. "Learning by Doing and Learning from Others: Human Capital and Technical Change in Agriculture," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(6), pages 1176-1209, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  5. Esther Duflo & William Gale & Jeffrey Liebman & Peter Orszag & Emmanuel Saez, 2005. "Saving Incentives for Low- and Middle-Income Families: Evidence from a Field Experiment with H&R Block," NBER Working Papers 11680, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  6. Dowd, Kevin, 1992. "Optimal Financial Contracts," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 44(4), pages 672-93, October. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  11. Benjamin, Dwayne, 1992. "Household Composition, Labor Markets, and Labor Demand: Testing for Separation in Agricultural Household Models," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 60(2), pages 287-322, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  1. McKenzie, David, 2009. "Impact assessments in finance and private sector development : what have we learned and what should we learn ?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4944, The World Bank. [Downloadable!]
  2. Galarza, Francisco, 2009. "Risk, Credit, and Insurance in Peru: Field Experimental Evidence," MPRA Paper 17833, University Library of Munich, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  3. Guirkinger, Catherine & Boucher, Steve, 2007. "Credit Constraints and Productivity in Peruvian Agriculture," Working Papers 6882, University of California, Davis, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. [Downloadable!]
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