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It is often assumed that transfers received from governments, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), friends and relatives help rural households to pool risk. In this paper I investigate two functions of transfers in Ethiopia: risk pooling and income redistribution. Unlike most of the literature this paper investigates not only whether but also how much risk pooling is achieved. I find evidence that transfers from governments/NGOs play a role in insuring covariant income shocks, (weak) evidence that transfers from friends/relatives insure idiosyncratic income shocks and evidence that transfers target the poor households. However, the contributions of transfers to risk pooling and income redistribution are economically very limited.

It is often assumed that transfers received from governments, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), friends and relatives help rural households to pool risk. In this paper I investigate two functions of transfers in Ethiopia: risk pooling and income redistribution. Unlike most of the literature this paper investigates not only whether but also how much risk pooling is achieved. I find evidence that transfers from governments/NGOs play a role in insuring covariant income shocks, (weak) evidence that transfers from friends/relatives insure idiosyncratic income shocks and evidence that transfers target the poor households. However, the contributions of transfers to risk pooling and income redistribution are economically very limited.

This paper investigates the interdependence between the risk-pooling activity of the financial sector and: output, consumption, risk-free rate, and Sharpe ratio in a dynamic general equilibrium model of a productive economy. Due to their exposure to idiosyncratic shocks and market segmentation, heterogeneous households/entrepreneurs (h/entrepreneurs) are willing to mitigate their risk through a financial sector. The financial sector pools risky claims issued by different firms within its assets, faces an associated intermediation cost and, via leverage, provides a risk-free asset to h/entrepreneurs. Exogenous systematic shocks change the relative size of the financial sector, and thus the equilibrium amount of pooled risk, making financial leverage state-dependent and counter-cyclical. We study how this mechanism endogenously channels amplication of consumption and mitigation of output fluctuations. In equilibrium, financial sector leverage also determines counter-cyclical Sharpe ratios and pro-cyclical risk-free interest rates. Last, we investigate the relationship between the size of the financial sector, leverage, and welfare. We show that limiting financial sector leverage determines a sub-optimal pooling of idiosyncratic risk but fosters the growth rate of the h/entrepreneurs' consumption. On the other side, when the financial sector is too large, it destroys too many resources after intermediation costs. Therefore, the h/entrepreneurs benet the most when the financial sector is neither too small nor too big.

AbstractThe size of an insurance pool that minimizes average risk per policy is derived for cases in which moral hazard offsets the benefits of pooling.

The safety of patients is an important responsibility of health care providers, and significant compensation costs may arise if providers are negligent. A widely debated option involves liability for such compensation being placed with the hospital rather than the individual clinician, a system known as "enterprise liability." In the United States, partial adoption of enterprise liability and proposals for its universal introduction have accompanied high-profile "malpractice insurance crises" in the last two decades. Hospitals in England and Wales have been subject to this system since 1990, and risk-pooling arrangements have emerged subsequently allowing hospitals to transfer their liability risk to an agency known as the National Health Service Litigation Authority. We explore some of the mechanisms used by this agency to provide hospital management with financial incentives to take care. We estimate the influence of these arrangements on the use of diagnostic imaging tests within hospitals, using a panel data set covering the period 200004, during which period a policy shift took place leading to a form of "natural experiment." Our results suggest that the use of diagnostic tests did not respond to the incentives created during this period. We speculate that certain types of patient care activity, including the use of diagnostic tests, may be less responsive to incentives placed at the level of the hospital by comparison with incentives placed at the level of the clinician. Our findings may have implications for jurisdictions contemplating a move to enterprise liability as well as wider implications for public-sector organizations faced with financial incentives to improve service quality. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractIn this article, we introduce the capacitated warehouse location model with risk pooling (CLMRP), which captures the interdependence between capacity issues and the inventory management at the warehouses. The CLMRP models a logistics system in which a single plant ships one type of product to a set of retailers, each with an uncertain demand. Warehouses serve as the direct intermediary between the plant and the retailers for the shipment of the product and also retain safety stock to provide appropriate service levels to the retailers. The CLMRP minimizes the sum of the fixed facility location, transportation, and inventory carrying costs. The model simultaneously determines warehouse locations, shipment sizes from the plant to the warehouses, the working inventory, and safety stock levels at the warehouses and the assignment of retailers to the warehouses. The costs at each warehouse exhibit initially economies of scale and then an exponential increase due to the capacity limitations. We show that this problem can be formulated as a nonlinear integer program in which the objective function is neither concave nor convex. A Lagrangian relaxation solution algorithm is proposed. The Lagrangian subproblem is also a nonlinear integer program. An efficient algorithm is developed for the linear relaxation of this subproblem. The Lagrangian relaxation algorithm provides near‐optimal solutions with reasonable computational requirements for large problem instances. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008