Credit Markets in Northern Nigeria: Credit as Insurance in a Rural Economy
研究了尼日利亚北部农村信贷市场，发现信息不对称不重要，信贷通过还款依赖双方生产冲击的合同来分担家庭间风险。
This article addresses the issues of incomplete markets and imperfect information in the context of credit markets in rural northern Nigeria. In much recent theoretical literature, the problems of moral hazard and adverse selection are assumed to be decisive for the organization of agrarian institutions. In contrast, it is found that in the four villages surveyed credit transactions take advantage of the free flow of information within rural communities. Information asymmetries between borrower and lender are unimportant, and their institutional consequences—the use of collateral and interlinked contracts—are absent. Credit transactions play a direct role in pooling risk between households through the use of contracts in which the repayment owed by the borrower depends on the realization of random production shocks by both the borrower and the lender.