Risk Pooling and Precautionary Saving in Village Economies

Risk Pooling and Precautionary Saving in Village Economies
Author: Marcel Fafchamps
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

We propose a new method to test for efficient risk pooling that allows for intertemporal smoothing, non-homothetic consumption, and heterogeneous risk and time preferences. The method is composed of three steps. The first one allows for precautionary savings by the aggregate risk pooling group. The second utilizes the inverse Engel curve to estimate good-specific tests for efficient risk pooling. In the third step, we obtain consistent estimates of households' risk and time preferences using a full risk sharing model, and incorporate heterogeneous preferences in testing for risk pooling. We apply this method to panel data from Indian villages to generate a number of new insights. We find that food expenditures are better protected from aggregate shocks than non-food consumption, after accounting for non-homotheticity. Village-level consumption tracks aggregate village cash-in-hand, suggesting some form of coordinated precautionary savings. But there is considerable excess sensitivity to aggregate income, indicating a lack of full asset integration. We also find a large unexplained gap between the variation in measured consumption expenditures and cash-in-hand at the aggregate village level. Contrary to earlier findings, risk pooling in Indian villages no longer appears to take place more at the sub-caste level than at the village level.

Risk-sharing in Village Economies Revisited

Risk-sharing in Village Economies Revisited
Author: Tessa Bold
Publisher:
Total Pages: 63
Release: 2016
Genre: Insurance
ISBN:

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.

Rural Poverty, Risk and Development

Rural Poverty, Risk and Development
Author: Marcel Fafchamps
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
Total Pages: 156
Release: 1999
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9789251043714

All men and women are subject to risk: illness, accident, death. Some shocks affect their ability to feed and support themselves properly, either temporarily: unemployment, crop failure, and loss of property; or permanently: disability, and skill obsolescence.This report summarises what is known and also what is not known about the sources of risk faced by the rural poor and their coping strategies. It examines the impact of risk and risk-coping strategies on development and the way in which governments and international organisations can assist in dealing with risk and overcoming poverty.

Rural Poverty, Risk and Development

Rural Poverty, Risk and Development
Author: Marcel Fafchamps
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781781950685

This book investigates the relationships between rural poverty, risk, and development. Building upon the author's work in the area, it summarises the contributions of recent theoretical and empirical work to our understanding of how risk affects rural poverty levels in developing countries. In particular the book examines what we do and do not know about risk coping strategies among today's poor rural societies. Ways in which these strategies may be re-examined and improved by governments and international organisations are proposed.

The Economics of Consumption

The Economics of Consumption
Author: Tullio Jappelli
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2017-09-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199383189

Consumption decisions are crucial determinants of business cycles and growth. Knowledge of how consumers respond to the economic environment and how they react to the risks that they encounter during the life-cycle is therefore important for evaluating stabilization policies and the effectiveness of fiscal packages implemented in response to economic downturns or financial crises. In The Economics of Consumption, Tullio Jappelli and Luigi Pistaferri provide a comprehensive examination of the most important developments in the field of consumption decisions and evaluate economic models against empirical evidence. The first part of the book provides the basic ingredients of economic models of consumption decisions. The central part reviews the empirical literature on the effect of income and wealth changes on consumption and on the relevance of precautionary saving and credit market imperfections. The last chapters extend the basic framework to such important areas as bequests, leisure, lifetime uncertainty, and financial sophistication. Jappelli and Pistaferri shed light on important issues, including how consumption responds to changes in economic resources, how economic circumstances and consumers' characteristics influence behavior, and whether consumption inequality depends on income shocks and their persistence.