The Global Food Price Crisis of 2007-2011 had mixed effects on the poor in developing nations. By some estimates, the Crisis lifted nearly 24 million poor farmers out of poverty; however, it also cast 68 million net food buyers into poverty. In this paper, we analyze the distributional impacts...

Lack of protection from downside risk has been posited as one explanation for sluggish technology uptake among subsistence agricultural households in the developing world. Access to credit and insurance is thought to be a stimulant to technology adoption where new methods are riskier but higher...

This paper investigates the farm-household decisions of adopting and abandoning higher-productivity technologies, under different scenarios of inclusion into the credit and deposit markets. The financial environment is further characterized by shallow financial markets, represented by a...

In this paper, we examine how China, the world’s largest rice producer and consumer, would affect the international rice market if it liberalized its trade in rice and became more fully integrated into the global rice market. The impacts of trade liberalization are estimated using a...

The paper presents an economic analysis of the Standard Reinsurance Agreement (SRA), the contract that governs the relationship between the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation and the private insurance companies that deliver crop insurance products to farmers. The paper outlines provisions of the...

This paper develops a model that solves for the optimal economic harvest rotation problem to maximize revenue of an even-aged forest plantation when there is a risk of a catastrophic forest fire. The paper also investigates the feasibility of using fire prone stands for carbon sequestration and...

Measuring the lower tail of a crop yield distribution is important for managing agricultural production risk and rating crop insurance. Common parametric techniques encounter difficulties when attempting to model extreme yield events. We evaluate and compare alternative models based on our...

In this paper, we examine the contract design problem of banks that extend loans to poor borrowers and seek to maximize outreach while remaining financially sustainable. A dynamic model is developed that shows how interest rates can be determined based on information about productivity and...

This paper analyzes effects of hypothetical changes in the Standard Reinsurance Agreement (SRA) on rates of return of private insurance companies participating in delivery of crop insurance. A computer simulation program is used to model companies' returns under the current and alternative SRA...