Increased availability and demand for low-deductible crop insurance policies have increased focus on crop insurance rating methods. Actuarial fairness cannot be achieved if constant multiplicative factors are used to determine how premiums change as coverage levels increase. A comparison of...

We project U.S. ethanol production and its impact on planted acreage, crop prices, livestock production, trade, and retail food costs. The projections are made using a multicommodity, multicountry, partial equilibrium model. Results indicate that expanded U.S. ethanol production will cause...

Purpose – While the demand for weather-based agricultural insurance in developed regions is limited, there exists significant potential for the use of weather indexes in developing areas. The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of historical data availability in designing actuarially...

Purpose – While the demand for weather‐based agricultural insurance in developed regions is limited, there exists significant potential for the use of weather indexes in developing areas. The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of historical data availability in designing...

This paper examines the role of uncertain crude oil prices, uncertain crop yields, and competition for acreage on corn, soybean, and switchgrass prices under biofuel production mandates. We find enforcement of the cellulosic mandate is costly in that it raises equilibrium prices of all three...

The efficiency of redistribution of government-provided revenue insurance programs is compared with the efficiency of the 1990 farm program. The results indicate that revenue insurance would be more efficient because it would provide subsidies when and only when revenue is low and marginal...

In this paper, we examine more closely some of the forces that underlie economic growth at the county level. In an effort to describe a much more comprehensive regional economic growth model, we address a variety of different hypotheses by introducing a large number of growth-related variables....