Westland, Clifford Gerrit2015-09-222015-09-222015-08-312015-08-31http://hdl.handle.net/10393/32900The development literature has consistently overlooked out of village links in the evaluation of informal insurance networks. This paper provides evidence that such an oversight may give a flawed impression of network formation decisions, given the high proportion of non-local transfer links in most studies to date – almost 60% in the Malawian data used for this study. Using a series of OLS and probit regressions, the results of this paper point to an endogenous propensity for households to link with non-local individuals for their informal insurance networks in a manner that distinguishes them from within-village insurance links.en