The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Bank suggest that agricultural growth is the most effective way to fight (child) malnutrition. Whether this is indeed the case is still very much debated, partly because there is little direct evidence on this topic. Using a dataset of 50...

The United States federal government currently subsidizes crop insurance to provide a safety-net to insured farmers. Agricultural economists have debated indirect impacts of the subsidized crop insurance program on producer behavior. One of those debates surrounds the issue of extensiveness, or...

The US crop insurance program previously used a simple average of equally weighted historical loss cost data to serve as the backbone for estimating crop insurance premium rates. This article develops a procedure for weighting the historical loss cost experience based on longer time-series...

Many risk management strategies, including hedging the price risk using forward or futures contracts require accurate forecasts of basis, i.e., spot price minus the futures price. Recent literature in this area has applied nonlinear time-series models, which are refinements of the linear...

Immigration reform is the most polarizing legislative issues in the US. Surprisingly, despite regular polling evidence of the American public's attitudes towards immigration reform proposals, little evidence has elicited the preferences of the group most affected by any policy changes - legal...

Climatic conditions and weather play an important role in production agriculture. Using district level panels for 42 years from India and dynamic panel estimation procedure we estimate the impact of weather risk on cropping intensity. Our non-stationary and dynamic panel model results suggest...

Zambia and particularly the Eastern province have one of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world. The most vulnerable are the children from rural households which depend entirely on seasonal agricultural production and income, and survive on diets that are deficiency in proteins and other...

This study examines how the U.S. crop mix pattern has responded to climate and in turn the potential effects of projected climate change. We find that there are significant effects of temperature and precipitation on the crop choice decisions.