Rate setting procedures for United States crop yield and revenue insurance contracts employ methods that presume correlations to be state invariant. Whether this is true matters. If yield-yield correlations strengthen when crops are subject to widespread stress, then diversification...

Major issues and challenges encountered in modeling and analyzing agricultural and trade policy reforms are reviewed. We focus on the modeling approach and pay special attention to the type and scope of the models, the calibration of a realistic baseline scenario, the representation of the...

The price-wedge method yields a tariff-equivalent estimate of technical barriers to trade (TBT). An extension of this method accounts for imperfect substitution between domestic and imported goods and incorporates recent findings on trade costs. We explore the sensitivity of this revamped...

Biotechnology has had an important impact on the agricultural and food industries over the last twelve years by way of fast and extensive adoption of a few genetically modified (GM) crops. This has produced large efficiency gains, including higher yields and reduced costs of weed and pest...

There have long been concerns that federal crop insurance subsidies may significantly impact land use decisions. It is well known that classical insurance market information asymmetry problems can lead to a social excess of risky land entering crop production. We provide a conceptual model to...

The U.S. federal government implements environmental, biofuels and crop insurance programs that influence land use. They are not well integrated in that cost savings from crop insurance subsidies are not acknowledged when screening land for retirement or when calculating the cost of land...

We quantify the emergence of biofuel markets and its impact on U.S. and world agriculture for the coming decade using the multi-market, multi-commodity international FAPRI (Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute) model. The model incorporates the trade-offs between biofuel, feed, and...

Based on a transparent analytical model of multiple markets including corn, ethanol, gasoline, and transportation fuel, this study estimates the welfare changes for consumers and producers resulting from ethanol production and related support polices in 2007. The welfare estimation takes into...

We analyze the impact of trade liberalization and removal of the federal tax credit in the United States on U.S. and Brazilian ethanol markets using a multi-market international ethanol model calibrated on 2005 market data and policies. The removal of trade distortions induces a 23.2 percent...

This study analyzes the impact of price shocks in three input and output markets critical to ethanol: gasoline, corn, and sugar. We investigate the impact of these shocks on ethanol and related agricultural markets in the United States and Brazil. We find that the composition of a country's...