Last updated on January 1, 2022
That’s the title of a new working paper my PhD student Chris Boyd (who’s on the market this year; hire her, she is wonderful!) and I finished over the holidays.
This paper picks up where my coauthors Yu Na Lee and David Just left off in our 2020 American Journal of Agricultural Economics article on producer behavior in the face of output price risk. An old theoretical conjecture in the literature is that in the absence of insurance, a risk-averse producer responds to the presence of price risk by cutting back on how much she produces, in an effort to reduce her exposure to income risk; much of agricultural policy (i.e., agricultural insurance) in high-income countries is predicated on that hypothesis.
Here is the abstract:
In a competitive market, a profit-maximizing producer’s total revenue is determined both by the quantity of output she chooses to produce and by the price at which she can sell that output. Of these two variables, only output is in part or wholly within the producer’s control, price being entirely determined by market forces. Given that, it is puzzling that the literature studying the effects of providing insurance to producers in low- and middle-income countries has ignored price risk entirely, focusing instead on insuring output. We run an artefactual lab-in-the-field experiment in Peru to look at the effects of insurance against output price risk on production. We randomize the order of three games: (i) a baseline game in which price risk is introduced at random, (ii) the baseline game to which we add mandatory insurance against price risk sold at an actuarially fair premium, and (iii) the baseline game to which we add voluntary insurance against price risk sold at the actuarially fair premium, but for which we offer a random 0-, 50- or 100-percent discount to exogenize take-up. Our results show that, on average, (i) price risk does not significantly change production relative to price certainty and (ii) neither does the provision of compulsory insurance against price risk, but (iii) the introduction of voluntary insurance causes the average producer on the market to produce more in situations of price risk than in situations of price certainty. Additionally, (iv) purchasing the voluntary insurance causes the average producer to produce more in situations of price risk relative than in situations of price certainty, but when looking only within situations where there is price risk, (v) this is due almost entirely to the insurance rather than to selection into purchasing the insurance. Our findings further suggest that (vi) even in the absence of the discount, the insurance against price risk would have a large (i.e., 70-percent) take-up rate.