The demand for hedging against price uncertainty in the presence of crop yield and revenue insurance contracts is examined for French wheat farms. The rationale for the use of options in addition to futures is first highlighted through the characterisation of the first-best hedging strategy in...

The concept of irreversible investment is applied to highly contagious animal disease control when uncertainty about the spread of the disease is resolved over time. In comparison with the strategy of destroying infected herds, the vaccination programme causes additional losses that cannot be...