Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Hidden information and Hidden Action in Rural Crop Insurance Markets

农业在本质上是有风险的，长期处于干旱、飓风、洪水、病虫害和农作物病害的威胁之下。为了应对农民管理风险的需要，几十年来，世界各地的政府和政策制定者一直试图提供公共作物保险或促进其私人提供。几乎所有这样的尝试都未能在没有政府补贴的情况下可持续地运营。项目：研究人员提议研究作物保险失败的原因。他们将与政府实体菲律宾作物保险公司合作，实施一项试验性的作物保险计划，为菲律宾农村的稻农提供保险。该设计将允许他们分别确定逆向选择(即当风险更高的农民对保险的需求更高时)和道德风险(即被覆盖农民为防止损害而降低的激励)的程度，这是保险市场有效运行的主要障碍。智力优势：利用实验方法论的最新发展，研究人员将能够通过经验分解这些理论机制，为合同经济学的开创性理论论文提供经验基础。此外，他们将超越最近的试验性贡献，纳入偏好的衡量标准，如个人对风险的厌恶，以进一步分解合同选择决策。这些经验证据将有助于从理论到测试再到理论的迭代过程，这对科学知识的进步是至关重要的。广泛的影响：这项研究有望对公共保险计划的设计和实施产生广泛的影响。这些发现将提高对保险市场运作的理解，并可能导致更好的监管和更有效的保险市场。最后，它将特别有助于作物保险计划的设计，从而改善农村贫困农民的风险管理选择，以及政府将公共资金用于农村发展的情况。

AbstractAgriculture is inherently risky, perpetually under threat from draughts, hurricanes, floods, pests and crop diseases. In response to farmers' need to manage risk, governments and policy makers throughout the world have for decades attempted to provide public crop insurance or promote its private provision. Almost all such attempts have failed to operate sustainably without government subsidies.Project: The researchers propose to study the reasons for this failure of crop insurance. They will, in partnership with the Philippine Crop Insurance Corporation, a government entity, implement an experimental crop insurance program offered to rice farmers in rural Philippines. The design will allow them to separately identify the extent of adverse selection (i.e. when demand for insurance is higher among farmers who are more at risk) and moral hazard (i.e. lowered incentives of covered farmers to prevent damages), the main barriers to efficient workings of insurance markets.Intellectual merit: Using recent developments in experimental methodology, the researchers will be able to provide an empirical foundation for seminal theoretical papers on the economics of contracts by empirically decomposing these theoretical mechanisms. In addition, they will go beyond recent experimental contributions by incorporating measures of preferences, such as an individuals' aversion to risk, to further decompose the contract selection decision. This empirical evidence will contribute to the iterative process, from theory to testing and back to theory, that is so essential to the advancement of scientific knowledge.Broader impacts: The research has the promise to have broad implications for the design and implementation of public insurance programs. The findings will improve understanding of the workings of insurance markets and may lead to better regulation and more efficient insurance markets. Finally, it will help in the design of crop insurance programs in particular and thereby improve both risk management options for poor rural farmers and the governments' use of public funds for rural development.