This research examined factors influencing farmer purchase of crop insurance and receipt of disaster assistance payments using survey data for more than 13,000 farms across 27 U.S. states. Using a bivariate probit model some main findings are as follows. The probability of participating in...

Mean-Variance theory of portfolio construction is still regarded as the main building block of modern portfolio theory. However, many authors have suggested that the mean-variance criterion, conceived by Markowitz (1952), is not optimal for asset allocation, because the investor expected utility...

There is growing interest in biomass from perennial grasses (e.g. switchgrass and miscanthus) for bioenergy production because of their high yields, their potential to be grown on low quality land with minimal competition with food crops and, and their ability to achieve significant reduction in...

The objective of this article is to propose the use of moment functions and maximum entropy techniques as a flexible way to estimate conditional crop yield distributions. We present a moment based model that extends previous approaches in several dimensions, and can be easily estimated using...