Insuring against crop yield risk is an important task in rural microfinance because such an insurance may improve access to capital for smallholders by substituting for collaterals. However, agricultural crop yield risk is even hard to mitigate in developed countries due to problems of...

Major externality cases are random accidents which are not adequately addressed by the deterministic environmental policy literature -­‐ that of Pigouvian taxes, abatement subsidies and cap-­‐and-­‐trade. We consider a risk-­‐neutral industry where firms control the probability...

The literature on economic growth and development has focused considerable attention on questions of risk management and the possibility of multiple equilibria associated with poverty traps. We use herd history data collected among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia to study stochastic wealth...

We develop a model of regulation of environmental risks in a heterogeneousindustry when policy makers are sensitive to uncertainties about the processes generating the risks. Optimal source reduction capacity is shown to vary according to site suitability. Optimal source reduction capacity and...

The study introduces an ex-ante evaluation concept into the analysis of weather-based index insurance effectiveness. We conduct our ex ante analysis by distinguishing between two consecutive periods: the first period is used for determining insurance parameters and optimal number of insurance...

The paper evaluates the effectiveness ofseveral index-based crop insurance schemes bycomparing results from two alternative evaluationapproaches. We apply the common ex post approachfrom the literature by specifying and evaluatinginsurance contracts by means of the data for the samehistorical...

Traditionally, disaster assistance was available on an ad hoc basis, but the 2008 Farm Act provides a standing disaster assistance program known as Supplemental Revenue Assistance (SURE). This paper introduces a theory of nested insurance to evaluate the impact on of SURE on intensification,...

We use the actual insurance records of 52,300 farmers and 11 years to estimate two sets of insurance demands. We define measures of insurance's expected returns, variance and third moment, based on observed insurance data, and infer the expected returns for those farmers that have never had an...

This paper presents a framework to determine optimal resource allocation over time for the production of a good by heterogeneous producers who generate a stock externality. We analyze the optimal intertemporal and quality-specific combination of abatement strategies at the source given by a...

This paper demonstrates the application of a recently developed methodology, the combination of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) with Bernanke structural vector autoregression (VAR) models, to model a system of U.S. commodity-related and value-added markets. As an example, the paper applies this...