In many low-income countries, agriculture is mostly rainfed and yields highly depend on climatic factors. Furthermore, farmers have little access to traditional crop insurance, which suffers from high information asymmetry and transaction costs. Insurances based on meteorological indices could...

"Legislation passed during the 1990s attempted to move U.S. agriculture disaster relief to a more market oriented process. The failure of this legislation has been attributed to the political system behind agricultural disaster relief. This paper explores the impact of political influence on the...

This paper shows that using yields may not be informative of the relationship between farm size and productivity in the context of small-scale farming. This occurs because, in addition to productivity, yields pick up size-dependent market distortions and decreasing returns to scale. As a result,...

Global gridded crop models (GGCMs) are the workhorse of assessments of the agricultural impacts of climate change. Yet the changes in crop yields projected by different models in response to the same meteorological forcing can differ substantially. Through an inter-method comparison, we provide...

Estimated Ricardian models have been criticized because they rely on mean temperatures and do not explicitly include extreme temperatures. This paper uses a cross sectional approach to compare a standard quadratic Ricardian model of mean temperature with a fully flexible daily temperature bin...

Indian agriculture is estimated to be consuming about 78 percent of total fresh water resources available in the country. Yet, more than half of the gross cropped area is still dependent on rains. Extremely skewed allocation of scarce irrigation water amongst crops and inefficient use of the...