Sarah Janzen’s research while affiliated with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and other places

... Four arms of the ANGeL project focused on gender and nutrition, and all of them significantly improved women's access to and decisions on financial services. This may be because joint training in a particular domain in each arm increased decision-making on credit use for that domain, even if the project did not directly involve credit 14,37 argued that projects relying on capacity-building can contribute to the perception that women can have greater access to credit than men. This was largely because of the increasing popularity of microfinance groups targeting women, allowing them to secure credit from other sources beyond the project itself. ...

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A systematic review of agricultural projects’ contributions to women’s empowerment

... The total value of livestock holding was preferred since most rural households save their earnings from agricultural crop production in livestock ownership which is also a symbol of wealth in the villages. Further, livestock holding is a major saving device especially for rural households in sub-Saharan Africa due to the less developed financial markets [48,49]. Many farm households protect themselves against crop failures by saving through livestock. ...

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Welfare effects and gender dimensions of adoption of climate smart agriculture practices: Evidence from Kenyan small-scale farmers1

... Papers in this issue follow that trend, adopting a range of statistical techniques such as differencein-differences Gupta et al., 2023;Siwach et al., 2023) or regression discontinuity designs (Varshney & Meenakshi, 2023) to establish causality. Others leverage the randomized allocation of resources pre-pandemic to uncover the longer-term impact of these interventions on households' ability to cope with COVID-19 (Ekstrom et al., 2023). The rest rely on correlational analysis and refrain from making claims of causality (Kabir et al. (2023), for example). ...

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Lessons from a time of upheaval: COVID ‐19 in South Asia

... In a recent study by [134], the authors analyzed index insurance demand within a prospect theory framework considering basis risk. They confirmed a negative relationship between loss aversion and insurance demand, particularly emphasizing the pronounced impact of loss aversion on farmers exposed to high basis risk. ...

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Index-based Insurance Design for Climate and Weather Risk Management: A Review

... With regard to the socioeconomic dimension of impacts, lowincome populations suffer more under climate change 12,13 , which may become a roadblock to poverty eradication without appropriate adaptation 14 . Showing the bidirectional interconnection of climate change and inequality, it may also hinder mitigation efforts 15 . ...

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Global economic impact of weather variability on the rich and the poor

... This new approach provides much greater opportunity to develop more precise measures of flooding than the original binary indicator of flooding on a given day. Following advice in Duflo et al. (2020) and Janzen and Michler (2021) to not stick to an inferior pre-specified method when a new, superior method becomes available, we adopted the fractional flood index data instead of the binary data. To help alleviate concerns that we selectively report a new flood measure that is particularly favorable to our hypotheses, we report results using four different flood measures based on the new data. ...

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Impact Evaluations in Data Poor Settings: The Case of Stress-Tolerant Rice Varieties in Bangladesh

... Accordingly, I constructed an aggregated index score for innovation output using the methodology developed by Anderson (2008). This approach employs a generalized least squares (GLS) weighting procedure, which effectively manages missing data, minimizes uncorrelated random errors among variables, and provides statistically robust tests compared to the traditional approach of using multiple proxies for innovation output (Anderson, 2008;Schwab et al., 2020;Ayad & Delmadji, 2024). This method is particularly advantageous because relying on a single metric, such as product or process innovation, offers only a limited perspective, while separately analyzing multiple outcomes of innovation risks inference issues due to multiple hypothesis testing across distinct outcome models (Schwab et al., 2020;Ayad & Delmadji, 2024 ...

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Lessons of the “Vergangenheit”: Optimal policy learning of innovation subsidies

... IBLI coverage in Ethiopia increases the likelihood that households would invest in crop production by approximately 12.4% (column 3) and the cultivation of nonirrigated land by approximately 0.34 ha. 10 Crop production is an emerging pastoralist production diversification strategy that demands more household labor and partial sedentarization than does livestock production (Sakketa et al., 2025). Other studies like Janzen and Carter (2019) documented that insured households in rural Kenya are less likely to sell assets, and access to insurance schemes significantly reduced the need for the poor to cut food consumption when faced with adverse shocks. The results of this study also suggest that consumption smoothing and asset protection effects of insurance schemes, in turn, significantly increase productive investments in subsequent years, thus, more work hours. ...

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Can index insurance alter pastoralists' labor allocation decisions? Evidence from East Africa

... Basis risk, namely the difference between the triggered insurance payout and the actual yield losses, poses a significant hurdle to the wide adoption of weather index insurance (e.g. Woodard and Garcia, 2008;Odening and Shen, 2014;Janzen et al., 2021). Thus, much attention has been paid to quantifying and alleviating this challenge (see Norton et al., 2012;Keller and Saitone, 2022). ...

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Data-driven determination of plant growth stages for improved weather index insurance design

... While the positive impact of microinsurance dominates most studies, some controversial aspects must be considered. Janzen et al. (2021) argue that premium subsidies targeting poor and vulnerable households are a strong case for public finance, but Takashino et al. (2017) caution that the impact of subsidies on social ties within a community should be critically evaluated, especially if the subsidies are discontinued after some time, causing changes in social relationships and networks. ...

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Microinsurance: Promoting Resilience and Welfare in the Informal Sector