Informal Insurance Arrangements with Limited Commitment: Theory and Evidence from Village Economies
通过构建有限承诺约束下的动态模型，解释村庄消费与收入的联动现象，并用印度三个村庄的数据检验模型，发现模型能解释消费对收入的动态响应，但无法解释消费的跨户分布。
Recent work on consumption allocations in village economies finds that idiosyncratic variation in consumption is systematically related to idiosyncratic variation in income, thus rejecting the hypothesis of full risk-pooling. We attempt to explain these observations by adding limited commitment as an impediment to risk-pooling. We provide a general dynamic model and completely characterise efficient informal insurance arrangements constrained by limited commitment, and test the model using data from three Indian villages. We find that the model can fully explain the dynamic response of consumption to income, but that it fails to explain the distribution of consumption across households. Copyright 2002, Wiley-Blackwell.