Social Capital, Income Diversification and Climate Change Adaptation: Panel Data Evidence from Rural Ethiopia
利用埃塞俄比亚面板数据，研究发现社会资本越多的家庭收入越专业化，表明多样化与非正式保险在风险缓解中相互替代，但此效应在气候变化易发区显著减弱。
Abstract The choice between specialisation and diversification of income is driven by multiple, interacting factors, such as economies of scale and scope, risk considerations, context, and household characteristics. Using panel data from Ethiopia, we investigate the role of social capital and the covariate risk of climate change and their interaction. We find that households with greater social capital tend to be more specialised, implying that diversification and informal insurance are substitutes in the mitigation of risk. We also find that this effect is significantly weaker in regions more prone to climate change, which is consistent with the average farmer being aware that informal insurance is not an effective protection against risks that affect the entire social network. We use instrumental variable random effects estimation to account for the plausible endogeneity of social capital and we also establish that our results do not depend on the poorest and most constrained individuals in our sample.