Journal
AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
Volume 104, Issue 1, Pages 149-182Publisher
AMER ECONOMIC ASSOC
DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.1.149
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Divn Of Social and Economic Sciences
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie [0752835] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We develop a model in which connections between individuals serve as social collateral to enforce informal insurance payments. We show that: (i) The degree of insurance is governed by the expansiveness of the network, measured with the per capita number of connections that groups have with the rest of the community. Two-dimensional networks-like real-world networks in Peruvian villages-are sufficiently expansive to allow very good risk-sharing. (ii) In - second-best arrangements, insurance is local: agents fully share shocks within, but imperfectly between endogenously emerging risk-sharing groups. We also discuss how endogenous social collateral affects our results.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available