Risk, Insurance and Wealth in Northern Nigeria

在欠发达国家的农村地区，风险是生活的中心事实。有大量的、主要是理论的文献，探讨了风险对个人行为和制度演变的后果。在缺乏完整的保险市场的情况下，家庭利用各种经济策略来减轻风险的后果。这个项目的目的是分析在尼日利亚北部一个重要但不完整的相互保险网络的社会背景下，家庭在试图应对风险时做出的联合储蓄和信贷市场决策。当保险市场不完善时，储蓄和信贷交易发挥着特殊的作用，使家庭能够在面临随机收入波动的情况下畅通消费流。将使用1988-1989年对该区域进行的九轮调查所收集的数据来分析这一问题。这一丰富的数据集将使人们能够调查家庭为应对最近收到的随机冲击而采取的事后战略。该分析将基于对随机冲击对净资产出售和净借款的影响的联合估计，并考虑到先前工作中揭示的信贷市场结构。了解促进消费的资产积累动机的规模，是对农村投资水平和构成进行更全面分析的先决条件。此外，调查结果应有助于目前关于旨在减少家庭易受干旱影响的干预措施的讨论。

Risk is a central fact of life in the rural areas of less developed countries. There is a vast, mainly theoretical literature that explores the consequences of risk for individual behavior and the evolution of institutions. In the absence of complete insurance markets, households utilize a variety of economic strategies in order to mitigate the consequences of risk. The purpose of this project is to analyze the joint saving and credit market decisions made by households as they attempt to cope with risk in a social setting characterized by an important, but incomplete mutual insurance network in northern Nigeria. Saving and credit transactions take on a special role when insurance markets are incomplete by allowing households to smooth their consumption streams in the face of random income fluctuations. This issue will be analyzed using data collected in a nine-round survey of the region in 1988-1989. This rich data set will permit an investigation of the ex post strategies adopted by households in response to the recent receipt of random shocks. The analysis will be based on joint estimation of the effect of random shocks on net asset sales and net borrowing, taking into account the structure of the credit market revealed in earlier work. An understanding of the magnitude of the consumption- smoothing motivation for asset accumulation is a prerequisite for a more general analysis of the level and composition of rural investment. In addition, the findings should contribute to current discussions regarding interventions designed to reduce the vulnerability of households to drought.