Double funding success!
Image credit: Dr Marco J Haenssgen
Monday 27 Jan 2020
Supporting idea generation and research design for a project on behavioural spill-overs in Thailand, the Institute of Advanced Study and the Warwick Interdisciplinary Centre for International Development have awarded £3,150 and £950 to a research team around Global Sustainable Development (GSD) Assistant Professor Marco J Haenssgen.
The research activity focuses on linkages or “spill-overs” between financial and health behaviours in the context of agricultural insurance. Farmers make choices that have a bearing on their own and their families’ health (e.g. medicine use, agricultural chemicals), and that have broader public health implications (e.g. crop burning and water security). Could farmers’ health-related actions be influenced unintentionally by nudges to adopt a new insurance product or the sense of security that comes with insurance influence? The consideration of such cross-domain spill-overs between finance and health is not only at the forefront of health-related behaviour change research, but it can also contribute to new context-sensitive policies to improve health equity and well-being among economically marginalised groups.
The team involves a high-profile consortium of experts in the areas of development economics, behavioural sciences, and sustainable livelihoods, including researchers from the Puey Ungphakorn Institute for Economic Research at the Bank of Thailand, the Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development at Chiang Mai University, the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, the University of Reading, Warwick Business School, and GSD. Consortium member Assistant Professor Marco J Haenssgen commented,
“We are extremely fortunate to work in a team containing such brilliant expertise and enthusiasm. GSD as an interdisciplinary hub has helped incubate our research agenda, and IAS has been a fantastically supportive institution to turn the team’s innovative ideas into reality. We are similarly thrilled to receive support from Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development as we align with their objective to tackle urgent problems of inequality and social, political and economic change on a global level. We are very excited for the next steps!”
