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We estimate the causal effects of index insurance coverage on subjective well-being among livestock herders in southern Ethiopia. By exploiting the randomized distribution of discount coupons and information treatments to instrument for the purchase of index-based livestock insurance, and three rounds of panel data, we separately identify ex ante welfare gains from insurance that reduces risk exposure and ex post buyer's remorse effects that may arise after the resolution of uncertainty. We find that current insurance coverage generates subjective well-being gains that are significantly higher than the buyer's remorse effect of an insurance policy that lapsed without paying out. Given the positive correlation in insurance purchase propensity over time, failure to control for potential buyer's remorse effects can bias downward estimates of welfare gains from current insurance coverage.

Pastoral systems.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred interest in the use of remote data collection techniques, including phone surveys, in developing country contexts. This interest has sparked new methodological work focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of remote data collection, the use of incentives to increase response rates, and how to address sample representativeness. By contrast, attention given to associated response fatigue and its implications remains limited. This study designed and implemented an experiment that randomized the placement of a survey module on women's dietary diversity in the survey instrument. The study also examines potential differential vulnerabilities to fatigue across food groups and respondents. The findings show that delaying the timing of mothers' food consumption module by 15 minutes leads to 8-17 percent decrease in the dietary diversity score and a 28 percent decrease in the number of mothers who consumed a minimum of four dietary groups. This is driven by underreporting of infrequently consumed foods; the experimentally induced delay in the timing of mothers' food consumption module led to decreases of 40 and 11 percent in the reporting of consumption of animal source foods and fruits and vegetables, respectively. The results are robust to changes in model specification and pass falsification tests. Responses by older and less educated mothers and those from larger households are more vulnerable to measurement error due to fatigue.

Coronavirus --- COVID-19 --- Demographic --- Dietary Diversity --- Disease Control and Prevention --- Health Survey --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Nutrition --- Phone Survey --- Poverty Monitoring and Analysis --- Poverty Reduction --- Response Fatigue

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This paper assesses the impact of Ethiopia's flagship social protection program, the Productive Safety Net Program on the adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food and nutrition security of households, mothers, and children. The analysis uses pre-pandemic, in-person household survey data and a post-pandemic phone survey. Two-thirds of the respondents reported that their incomes had fallen after the pandemic began, and almost half reported that their ability to satisfy their food needs had worsened. Employing a household fixed effects difference-in-difference approach, the study finds that household food insecurity increased by 11.7 percentage points and the size of the food gap by 0.47 months in the aftermath of the onset of the pandemic. Participation in the Productive Safety Net Program offsets virtually all of this adverse change - the likelihood of becoming food insecure increased by only 2.4 percentage points for Productive Safety Net Program households and the duration of the food gap increased by only 0.13 month. The protective role of the program is greater for poorer households and those living in remote areas. The results are robust to various definitions of program participation, different estimators, and different ways of accounting for the non-randomness of mobile phone ownership. Productive Safety Net Program participants were less likely to reduce expenditures on health and education by 7.7 percentage points and less likely to reduce expenditures on agricultural inputs by 13 percentage points. By contrast, mothers' and children's diets changed little, despite some changes in the composition of diets, with consumption of animal source foods declining significantly.

Agriculture --- Coronavirus --- COVID-19 --- Diet Diversity --- Food Gap --- Food Security --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Nutrition --- Pandemic Response --- Poverty Reduction --- PSNP --- Safety Nets --- Safety Nets and Transfers --- Services and Transfers to Poor --- Social Protection --- Social Protections and Assistance