A review of crop-insurance schemes is followed by a discussion of a guaranteed-yield, crop-insurance plan. General formulae for the distribution function and mathematical expectation of indemnities for the insurance plan are presented in terms of the distribution of crop yields. Three special...

Twenty-one pastoralists in the West Darling region of New South Wales were interviewed to gain an understanding of the attitudes of managers in this high-risk pastoral area to uncertain prospects. It was found that pastoralists had no difficulty in specifying subjective probabilities but in...

This paper presents a metafrontier production function model for firms in different groups having different technologies. The metafrontier model enables the calculation of comparable technical efficiencies for firms operating under different technologies. The model also enables the technology...

This paper uses cross-sectional data collected from 375 smallholder yam farmers in Ghana in 2010 to examine whether the adoption of yam minisett technology had an effect on the technical efficiency of production of the yam farmers. We correct for endogeneity in adoption and employ stochastic...

The modelling and estimation of frontier production functions has been an important area of econometric research during the last two decades. Forsund, Lovell and Schmidt (1980) and Schmidt (1986) present reviews of the concepts and models involved and cite some of the empirical applications...

After the financial crisis in 1997, the Thai government established and promoted financial services to rural areas to improve the quality of life of rural households and increase the productivity and technical efficiency of farmers. This paper seeks to investigate the impact of financial...