Do tropical typhoons smash community ties?
) (Paris School of Economics) Abstract In rural economies, risk-sharing arrangements through networks of relatives and friends are common. Monitoring issues seem to impede the development of informal insurance mechanisms at higher level. As such, after a large and covariate shock, the prerequisites under which informal arrangements are feasible might refrain the community to redistribute efficiently resources between sub-groups. I rely on a model of imperfect commitment to derive predictions on the sustainability of risk-sharing arrangements in the aftermath of extreme events at a higher level than usually considered by the literature. I then test these predictions on a representative panel data in Vietnam, using tropical typhoons trails and wind structures. The estimation of a structural equation derived by the theory is compatible with a model of imperfect commitment where the aftermath of natural disasters is associated with stronger enforcement mechanisms at commune level. As such,
