This article reviews actuarial procedures used to calculate premium rates in the federal crop insurance program. Average yields are used as an important indicator of risk under current rating practices. The strength and validity of this relationship is examined using historical yield data drawn...

A variety of crop revenue insurance programs have recently been introduced. A critical component of revenue insurance contracts is quantifying the risk associated with stochastic prices. Forward-looking, market-based measures of price risk which are often available in form of options premia are...

Soybean rust is a highly mobile infectious disease and can be transmitted across short and long distances. Soybean rust is estimated to cause yield losses that can range between 1%-25%. An analysis of spatio-temporal infection risks within the United States is performed through the use of a...

Dynamic relationships among three classes of wheat are investigated using threshold VAR models that incorporate the effects of protein availability. Changes in the stock of protein are found to generate significant responses in the prices of hard red spring wheat and hard red winter wheat, but...

A conceptual model of grocery coupon usage is developed and maximum likelihood estimates of a Tobit model are used to assess the influence of several economic and demographic variables on consumers'Â’ use of grocery coupons. Specific factors considered include income, age, household size,...

Low-fat ground beef (LFGB) is a new product designed to be as palatable as beef products that contain significantly higher levels of fat. A hedonic model shows that each unitary increase in the leanness of ground beef products carries a price premium of $.0206/lb. If LFGB garners a 10% share of...

Recent research has questioned the extent to which government policies, including conservation and risk management programs, have influenced environmental indicators. The impacts of income-supporting and risk management programs on soil erosion are considered. An econometric model of the...

The objective of this study is to evaluate the risk associated with major agricultural commodity yields in the United States. We are particularly concerned with the nonstationary nature of the yield distribution, which arises primarily as a result of technological progress and changing...

This study evaluates quality, production, and price risk within the context of overall profit variability in fed cattle production. The approach used offers a flexible way to estimate a large system of equations with more than three jointly related censored outcomes. Trade-offs between quality...