Insurance, Credit, and Technology Adoption : Field Experimental Evidence from Malawi
The adoption of new agricultural
technologies may be discouraged because of their inherent
riskiness. This study implemented a randomized field
experiment to ask whether the provision of insurance against
a major source of production risk induces farmers to take
out loans to invest in a new crop variety. The study sample
was composed of roughly 800 maize and groundnut farmers in
Malawi, where by far the dominant source of production risk