This paper presents the first laboratory study of risk-sharing without commitment. Our experiment captures the main features of a simple model of voluntary insurance between two agents. In the model, two individuals interact over a potential infinite horizon and suffer random income shocks....

This paper shows that when donors and recipients care about each other --two-sided altruism -- the presence of asymmetry of information about the donor's income leads very naturally to a signaling game. A donor who cares about the recipient's welfare has incentives to appear richer than he is...

We study informal insurance within communities, explicitly recognizing the possibility that subgroups of individuals may destabilize insurance arrangements among the larger group. We therefore consider self-enforcing risk-sharing agreements that are robust not only to single-person deviations...

Achieving peace and building the institutions that will make it last require much time and effort on the part of adversaries. While making this effort, the likelihood of peace is uncertain and preparations for conflict are on-going. We examine a setting that takes such considerations into...

This paper proposes measures of income risk that households face, and of the extent of insurance effectively delivered by the various coping mechanisms those households use to minimize the consequence of that risk by (1) contrasting the expected utility of consumption an individual has with the...

This paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within a unique data set of 712 extended family networks from Tanzania. Using cross-reports on asset holdings, we construct measures of misperception of income among all pairs of households belonging to the same network. We show that...

This paper studies the impact of female property rights on male and female suicide rates in India. Using state level variation in legal changes to women's property rights, we show that better property rights for women are associated with a decrease in the difference between female and male...

This paper develops a theory of socially determined aspirations, and the interaction of those aspirations with growth and inequality. The interaction is bidirectional: economy-wide outcomes determine individual aspirations, which in turn determine investment incentives and social outcomes. Thus...

If people's labor-supply decisions are taken at the level of the household, it is natural to expect aggregate demand and unemployment to influence the supply curve of labor. An increase in unemployment could prompt households to send more workers out in search of work to insure against the risk...