Details — Faculty Seminar in Economics: “Do Index-Insured Loans Spur Technology Adoption? Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in Northern Ghana” — September 16
| Date: 9/16 | Time: noon |
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On Wednesday, September 16, the Bruce R. Thompson Center for Business and Economics welcomes Dr. Khushbu Mishra, assistant professor of Economics at Stetson University, who will present her research paper entitled,“Do Index-Insured Loans Spur Technology Adoption? Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in Northern Ghana.” Community members may attend this lecture via Zoom by emailing bryan@allegheny.edu by noon on Wednesday.
Adoption of advanced agricultural technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa remains disappointingly low, particularly among the millions of poor smallholders who account for most of the agricultural production. We conducted a two-treatment randomized control trial in northern Ghana to assess the impact of using drought-index insurance to insure the full repayable amount of joint liability, agricultural production loans taken by smallholder farmers. In the micro-insurance treatment, any index insurance payouts go directly to farmers while in the meso-insurance treatment, payouts are directly sent to banks to be used to expunge farmers’ debts. At first, it seems that bundling loans with micro-insurance spurs a significant increase in the adoption of some of the improved production technologies considered in our study. When a correction for multiple hypothesis tests is done the statistical significance of these impacts no longer remains which implies that they may have shown up by chance in the first place. Overall, we conclude that bundling index insurance with joint liability lending does not increase technology adoption. In addition, our results also highlight the importance of multiple hypothesis testing in studies that have more than one treatment and several outcomes.
Khushbu Mishra finished her Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Ohio State University in the summer of 2017. Her work broadly focuses on Gender and Development Economics, Agricultural Economics, and Impact Evaluation. She completed her bachelor’s in economics and mathematics from Mount Holyoke College.