Person:
Gine, Xavier
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Fields of Specialization
Financial inclusion
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Development Research Group
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Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Xavier Gine is a Lead Economist in the Finance and Private Sector Development Team of the Development Research Group. He is currently a BREAD affiliate and Associate Editor for the Journal of Development Economics. Since joining the World Bank as a Young Economist in 2002, his research has focused on access to financial services and rural financial markets. In recent papers he investigated the macroeconomic effects of a credit liberalization; the relationship between formal and informal sources of credit in rural credit markets; indigenous interlinked credit contracts in the fishing industry and the impact of microfinance services such as business training and financial literacy, microinsurance and microsavings. Prior to joining the Bank he was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain, an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 70
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Publication
Patterns of Rainfall Insurance Participation in Rural India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-11)This paper describes the contract design and institutional features of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered to smallholder farmers in rural India, and presents preliminary evidence on the determinants of insurance participation. Insurance takeup is found to be decreasing in basis risk between insurance payouts and income fluctuations, increasing in household wealth and decreasing in the extent to which credit constraints bind. These results match with predictions of a simple neoclassical model appended with borrowing constraints. Other patterns are less consistent with the "benchmark" model; namely, participation in village networks and measures of familiarity with the insurance vendor are strongly correlated with insurance takeup decisions, and risk-averse households are found to be less, not more, likely to purchase insurance. We suggest that these results reflect household uncertainty about the product itself, given their limited experience with it. -
Publication
Insurance, Credit, and Technology Adoption : Field Experimental Evidence from Malawi
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-12)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 is the level of rainfall. We randomly selected half of the farmers to be offered credit to purchase high-yielding hybrid maize and improved groundnut seeds for planting in the November 2006 crop season. The other half of the farmers were offered a similar credit package but were also required to purchase (at actuarially fair rates) a weather insurance policy that partially or fully forgave the loan in the event of poor rainfall. Surprisingly, take up was lower by 13 percentage points among farmers offered insurance with the loan. Take-up was 33.0 percent for farmers who were offered the uninsured loan. There is suggestive evidence that the reduced take-up of the insured loan was due to the high cognitive cost of evaluating the insurance: insured loan take-up was positively correlated with farmer education levels. By contrast, the take-up of the uninsured loan was uncorrelated with farmer education. -
Publication
Statistical Analysis of Rainfall Insurance Payouts in Southern India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-12)Using 40 years of historical rainfall data, this paper estimates a distribution for payouts on rainfall insurance policies offered to farmers in the State of Andhra Pradesh, India, in 2006. The authors find that the contracts primarily protect households against extreme tail events; half the expected value of indemnities paid by the insurance are generated by only 2 percent of rainfall realizations. Contract payouts are significantly correlated cross-sectionally, and also inversely associated with real GDP growth. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for the potential benefits of insurance to households, the risks facing a financial institution underwriting rainfall insurance contracts, and pricing. -
Publication
How Does Risk Management Influence Production Decisions? Evidence from a Field Experiment
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-07)Weather is a key source of income risk for many firms and households, particularly in emerging market economies. This paper uses a randomized controlled trial approach to study how an innovative risk management instrument for hedging rainfall risk affects production decisions among a sample of Indian agricultural firms. The analysis finds that the provision of insurance induces farmers to shift production toward higher-return but higher-risk cash crops, particularly among more-educated farmers. The results support the view that financial innovation may help mitigate the real effects of uninsured production risk. In a second experiment, the study elicits willingness to pay for insurance policies that differ in their contract terms, using the Becker-DeGroot-Marshak mechanism. Willingness-to-pay is increasing in the actuarial value of the insurance, but substantially less than one-for-one, suggesting that farmers' valuations are inconsistent with a fully rational benchmark. -
Publication
Does a Picture Paint a Thousand Words? Evidence from a Microcredit Marketing Experiment
(World Bank, 2011-10-18)Female entrepreneurship is low in many developing economies partly due to constraints on women's time and mobility, often reinforced by social norms. We analyze a marketing experiment designed to encourage female uptake of a new microcredit product. A brochure with two different covers was randomly distributed among male and female borrowing groups. One cover featured 5 businesses run by men while the other had identical businesses run by women. We find that both men and women respond to psychological cues. Men who are not themselves business owners, have lower measured ability and whose wives are less educated respond more negatively to the female brochure, as do women business owners with low autonomy within the household. Women with relatively high levels of autonomy shown the male brochure have a similar negative response, while there is no effect on female business owners with autonomy shown the female brochure. Overall, these results suggest that women's response to psychological cues, such as positive role models, may be mediated by their autonomy and that more disadvantaged women may require more intensive interventions. -
Publication
Barriers to Household Risk Management : Evidence from India
(American Economic Association, 2013-01)Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of nonsystematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and nonprice factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. Demand is significantly price sensitive, but widespread take-up would not be achieved even if the product offered a payout ratio comparable to US insurance contracts. We present evidence suggesting that lack of trust, liquidity constraints, and limited salience are significant nonprice frictions that constrain demand. We suggest possible contract design improvements to mitigate these frictions. -
Publication
Evaluation of Financial Liberalization : A General Equilibrium Model with Constrained Occupation Choice
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-04)The objective of this paper is to assess both the aggregate growth effects and the distributional consequences of financial liberalization as observed in Thailand from 1976 to 1996. A general equilibrium occupational choice model with two sectors, one without intermediation, and the other with borrowing and lending, is taken to Thai data. Key parameters of the production technology and the distribution of entrepreneurial talent are estimated by maximizing the likelihood of transition into business given initial wealth as observed in two distinct datasets. Other parameters of the model are calibrated to try to match the two decades of growth as well as observed changes in inequality, labor share, savings, and the number of entrepreneurs. Without an expansion in the size of the intermediated sector, Thailand would have evolved very differently, namely, with a drastically lower growth rate, high residual subsistence sector, non-increasing wages, but lower inequality. The financial liberalization brings welfare gains and losses to different subsets of the population. Primary winners are talented would-be entrepreneurs who lack credit and cannot otherwise go into business (or invest little capital). Mean gains for these winners range from 17 to 34 percent of observed overall average household income. But liberalization also induces greater demand by entrepreneurs for workers resulting in increases in the wage and lower profits of relatively rich entrepreneurs of the same order of magnitude as the observed overall average income of firm owners. Foreign capital has no significant impact on growth or the distribution of observed income. -
Publication
Money or Ideas? A Field Experiment on Constraints to Entrepreneurship in Rural Pakistan
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06)This paper identifies the relative importance of human and physical capital for entrepreneurship. A subset of rural microfinance clients were offered eight full time days of business training and the opportunity to participate in a loan lottery of up to Rs. 100,000 (USD 1,700), about seven times the average loan size. The study finds that business training increased business knowledge, reduced business failure, improved business practices and increased household expenditures by about $40 per year. It also improved financial and labor allocation decisions. These effects are concentrated among male clients, however. Women improve business knowledge but show no improvements in other outcomes. A cost-benefit analysis suggests that business training was not cost-effective for the microfinance institution, despite having a positive impact on clients. This may explain why so few microfinance institutions offer training. Access to the larger loan, in contrast, had little effect, indicating that existing loan size limits may already meet the demand for credit for these clients. -
Publication
How Accurate Are Recall Data? Evidence from Coastal India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-03)This paper investigates the accuracy of recall data by comparing administrative records with retrospective, self-reported survey responses to income and asset questions for a sample of self-employed households from coastal India. It finds that the magnitude of the recall error increases over time, in part because respondents rely less on memory and instead infer earnings based on past earnings. Individuals tend to recall monthly earnings more accurately when they are higher than the median. These results imply that the variance estimated from the self-reported earnings distribution will be lower than the real one. The paper also finds that data reported by income earners are more accurate than those by their wives. In addition, the use of time cues can worsen accuracy if they are not relevant to the respondent. Where the recall questions are placed in the two-hour long survey, however, does not affect accuracy. -
Publication
Financial (Dis-)Information : Evidence from an Audit Study in Mexico
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06)An audit study was conducted in peri-urban Mexico to understand the quality of information and products offered to low-income potential customers. Trained auditors visited multiple financial institutions seeking credit and savings products. Consistent with Gabaix and Laibson (2006), staff voluntarily provides little information about avoidable fees, especially to auditors trained to reveal little knowledge about the market. In addition, clients are almost never offered the cheapest product, most likely because staff is incentivized to offer more expensive products that are thus more profitable to the institution. This suggests that disclosure and transparency policies may be ineffective if they undermine the commercial interest of financial institutions.