A multiyear discrete stochastic programming model with uncertain water supplies and inter-year crop dynamics is developed to determine: (i) whether a multiyear drought’s impact can be more than the sum of its parts, and (ii) whether optimal response to 1 year of drought can increase a...

Decision‐making in agriculture is carried out in an uncertain environment with farmers often seeking information to reduce risk. As a result of the extreme variability of rainfall and stream‐flows in north‐eastern Australia, water supplies for irrigated agriculture are a limiting factor...

The potential for hedging Australian wheat with the new Sydney Futures Exchange wheat contract is examined using a theoretical hedging model parametised from previous studies. The optimal hedging ratio for an `average' wheat farmer was found to be zero under reasonable assumptions about...

One approach to rationalising policies for addressing potentially catastrophic climate change when such policies may prove unnecessary is to suppose the policies provide a form of social insurance even in the presence of pure uncertainty. Then, provided the policies are effective, such insurance...

Australia has an incredibly variable and unpredictable hydroclimate, and while irrigation is designed to reduce risk, significant uncertainty remains in both seasonal water availability (‘allocations’) and irrigation crop water requirements. This paper explores the nature and impacts of...

The increasing prevalence of anthelmintic (drench) resistance in gastrointestinal parasite populations is decreasing the profitability of the Australian sheep industry. Refugia management can delay its development by not exposing a proportion of the worm population to chemical control. A...

Most, if not all, production technologies are stochastic. This article demonstrates how data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods can be adapted to accommodate stochastic elements in a state-contingent setting. Specifically, we show how observations on a random input, not under the control of the...

It is likely that climate change will be associated with reductions in inflows of water to the Murray–Darling Basin. In this study, we analyse the effects of climate change in the Murray–Darling Basin using a simulation model that incorporates a state-contingent representation of...

Illegal foreign fishing for sharks in Northern Australia has increased substantially over the last two decades. This has likely resulted in declines of shark species abundance, with potentially far-reaching impacts on the ecosystem. This, in turn, could also have indirectly affected the legal...

This study examines the impact of flood-hazard zone location on residential property prices. The study utilises data from over 2000 private residential property sales occurred during 2006 in North Shore City, New Zealand. A spatial autoregressive hedonic model is developed to provide efficient...