Recent and presumable future developments tend to increase the risks associated with farming activities. These include climate risks which have always played an important role in farming. Weather based instruments can be valuable tools to reduce the risk associate with unfavourable climatic...

This paper considers the potential for securitizing index-based insurance products that transfer weather and natural disaster risks from lower income countries. The paper begins with a brief overview of why markets for natural disaster risks are important in lower income countries and a review...

Replaced with revised version of paper 11/18/08.

Basis risk has been cited as a primary concern for implementing weather hedges. This study investigates several dimensions of weather basis risk for the U.S. corn market at various levels of aggregation. The results suggest that while the degree of geographic basis risk may be significant in...

Replaced with revised version of paper 11/18/08

Climate Change is expected to improve crop production conditions significantly in northern Europe. In some studies a significant increase in agricultural production is expected in northern Europe while drought is becoming gradually more severe in Southern Europe and France due to climate change....

Climate change with increasing climate variability is likely to alter risks in agricultural production. The effectiveness of using weather derivatives to hedge against drought risks for rain-fed grain maize production was investigated for current (1981-2003) and future (2070- 2100) climates in...

This article develops an Indifference Pricing model for a weather derivative that is traded over the counter. The model is used to calculate ask and bid prices for a put option on a weather index in Germany. We find that under moderate risk aversion the maximal bid prices of grain producers...

To develop weather insurance, GROUPAMA builds a general model of agronomic crop yield density function. This approach is applied for cereal, industrial products, wine and fruits. From the density function, weather risk premium is computed. The wine-producing practices disturb our approach of...

We develop a method to structurally estimate principal-agent models by ordinary least squares (OLS). We set up a general principal-agent model which explicitly incorporates the wealth levels of each party and the opportunity cost to the agent of entering the contract. This yields an optimal...