Title: Mutual Insurance and Land Security in Rural Ghana (joint with Georgios Manalis)

Speaker: Karol Mazur, PHBS

Time：2024/12/13, 13:30-15:00

Venue: 106 Zhonghui Building

About the speaker

Karol Mazur works as assistant professor of economics at Peking University HSBC Business School. His research on macroeconomics, development and human capital has been funded by the British Academy and published in the Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics and Journal of Public Economics.

Abstract

We study the impact of endogenous choice of land security on the functioning of informal insurance and land re-allocations in Ghana’s rural communities. In line with existing literature, we find that land re-allocations are more intense in villages with higher land security, generating increases in agricultural productivity and level of average consumption. New to the literature, we show that communities with higher land security enjoy improved risk-sharing against idiosyncratic shocks. Motivated by this evidence, we develop a dynamic model of land and risk sharing subject to limited commitment constraints, where the equilibrium degree of co-operation is determined by the degree of land security chosen. We show that the model can rationalize our empirical findings and can serve as a useful quantitative laboratory. Most interestingly, the effects of increasing land security may be highly non-linear as at some point they may lead to a complete unraveling of informal co-operation in rural economies.