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...

The agricultural production of Indian farmers is investigated using a stochastic frontier production function which incorporates a model for the technical inefficiency effects. Farm-level data from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) are used. Variables...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been responsible for conducting periodic surveys to estimate food consumption patterns of households and/or individuals in the United States for over 50 years. Data from these surveys have had a significant impact on the formulation of...

A stochastic frontier model is proposed for analysis of crop yields, which considers the effects of differing quality of irrigation water, in addition to different inputs and factors associated with technical inefficiency of production. The parameters of the production frontier involved are...

Two models of technical inefficiency with a stochastic production frontier are considered in this paper. In the first model, it is assumed that the frontier itself does not vary with time, while in the second, the frontier is allowed to move. These models are applied to four years of panel data...

The parameters of the distribution of usual intakes of calcium, energy, iron, protein and vitamin C are estimated using four daily intakes of these dietary components for a sample of women selected in the Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals, conducted in 1985-86 by the Human...

The significance of statistical lack-of-fit tests for hypothesized response functions describing experimental data is traced in some of the recent agricultural economics literature. The statistical test is reviewed in a regression framework and it is shown that the test is related to testing...