Characterising Informal Risk Sharing in Family Networks

风险在发展中国家的农村地区非常普遍，但信贷和保险市场不发达，政府很少提供发达经济体常见的社会保险类型，其结果是，风险在短期和长期对家庭福祉都有相当大的影响。在这种情况下，家庭求助于非正式工具，如亲戚和朋友之间的转移和贷款，以分担特殊风险。这种非正式的风险分担很可能发生在社交网络(朋友和家人)中，因为网络成员之间的人际关系可以缓解信息不对称等摩擦，因为相互了解并经常互动的个人可以共享信息并有效地执行非正式安排。尤其是家庭网络，实现了这些特点，形成了一种“天然”的风险分担机制。本研究旨在从理论和实证上加深我们对家庭网络中风险分担的理解，明确关注网络结构(谁与谁相关)的作用。这一点可能很重要，因为许多用于风险分担的非正式工具依赖于双边关系。因此，一个人与谁有关联，以及他们的链接与谁有进一步的联系，将决定风险的分担方式和分担的金额。经济学中很少有实证研究考虑网络结构在塑造经济结果中的作用，尽管这在社会学等领域被证明是重要的。出现这种情况的一个原因是缺乏包含网络链接信息和广泛社会经济信息的适当数据集。这项研究的一个关键创新是使用来自墨西哥的丰富数据集来绕过这个问题，这两个数据集都有。家庭网络联系可以使用墨西哥的命名惯例来识别，即每个人都有两个姓氏--每个父母一个姓氏。这一数据集拥有居住在500多个村庄的所有家庭的详细社会经济信息(在10年内的多个时间点)，使我能够识别整个基于村庄的大家庭网络，并构建有效的风险分担测试。拟议的研究将：1.为网络结构对风险分担的重要性提供经验证据。最近的理论工作证实了这一点，并预测网络结构对是否发生风险分担以及可以实现的风险程度至关重要。然而，由于上面提到的数据限制，几乎没有关于这一点的经验证据。本研究将构建和实施对这些模型的实证测试，利用数据中的丰富信息来解释这样的担忧，即结果可能是由以下事实驱动的：家庭网络(和网络结构)可能是专门为风险分担目的而形成的。2.从理论上对更高价值的网络提供更好的保险的预测进行了实证研究。最初的贡献将是使用有关消费和财富的信息来近似估计链接(和网络)的价值。调查家庭网络中的利他主义或相互关怀是否通过允许更广泛的风险分担安排，在有限的承诺下允许更多的风险分担。我将从理论和经验上调查这种情况是否属实。理解非正式风险分担的驱动因素对政策很重要：旨在改善保险的政府政策可能会通过排挤非正式风险分担来实现相反的效果。这项研究将为旨在改善穷人保险的政府政策和保险产品的设计提供信息，这是拉丁美洲和其他低收入和中等收入国家以及保险公司持续感兴趣和辩论的主题。

Risk is extremely prevalent in rural areas of developing countries, but markets for credit and insurance are undeveloped and governments rarely provide the type of social insurance common in developed economies, with the consequence that risk has considerable repercussions for household wellbeing both in the short and long run. Households in these contexts resort to informal tools, such as transfers and loans between relatives and friends, to share idiosyncratic risk. Such informal risk sharing likely occurs within social networks (friends and family), since interpersonal relationships between network members can alleviate frictions such as asymmetric information, as individuals who know each other well and interact frequently can share information and effectively enforce informal arrangements. Family networks, in particular, fulfil these features and form a "natural" risk sharing institution. This research aims to deepen our understanding of risk sharing in family networks theoretically and empirically, focusing explicitly on the role of network structure (representation of who is related to who). This is likely important because many informal tools employed for risk sharing rely on bilateral relationships. Therefore, who one is linked with and who their links are further linked with is will shape both how risk is shared and the amount shared. Very few empirical studies in economics have considered the role of network structure in shaping economic outcomes, though this has been shown to be important in fields such as sociology. A reason for this is a lack of suitable datasets containing both information on network links and extensive socio-economic information. A key innovation of this study is to circumvent this problem using a rich dataset from Mexico with both of these. Family network links can be identified using the Mexican naming convention, whereby each individual has 2 surnames - one from each parent. This dataset has detailed socio-economic information (at multiple points over 10 years) on all households living in over 500 villages, allowing me to identify the entire village based extended family network and construct valid tests for risk sharing.The proposed research will:1. Provide empirical evidence on the importance of network structure for risk sharing. Recent theoretical work confirms this and predicts that network structure matters for whether or not risk sharing occurs and the amount that can be achieved. Yet, there is almost no empirical evidence on this, due to data constraints mentioned above. This research will construct and implement empirical tests for these models, exploiting the rich information in the data to account for concerns that results may be driven by the fact that family networks (and network structure) may have formed specifically for risk sharing purposes. 2. Investigate empirically predictions from theory that networks of higher value provide better insurance. An original contribution will be to approximate the value of a link (and network) using information on consumption and wealth.3. Investigate whether altruism, or mutual caring, in family networks allows for more risk sharing under limited commitment, by allowing for a wider set of risk sharing arrangements. I will investigate whether this is the case theoretically and empirically.Understanding the drivers of informal risk sharing is important for policy: government policies aimed at improving insurance could do the converse by crowding out informal risk sharing. This research will inform the design of government policies and insurance products aimed at improving insurance for the poor, a subject of on-going interest and debate in Latin America and other low and middle-income countries, and among insurance companies.