Barriers to Household Risk Management

Financial engineering offers the potential to significantly reduce consumption fluctuations faced by individuals, households, and firms. Yet much of this promise remains unrealized. In this paper, we study the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product designed to compensate low-income Indian farmers in case of deficient rainfall during the primary monsoon season. We first document relatively low levels of adoption of this new risk management technology: only 5-10% of households purchase insurance, even though rainfall variability is overwhelmingly cited by households as the most important risk they face. We then conduct a series of randomized field experiments to test theoretical predictions of why adoption may be low.