Recent accusations against speculators in general and long-only commodity index funds inparticular, include: increasing market volatility, distorting historical price relationships, andfueling a rapid increase and decrease in commodity inflation. Some researchers have argued thatthese market...

Producers have a wide variety of risk management instruments available. How do producers make a choice of risk management instruments? Using the recently developed choice bracketing framework, we examine what risk management strategies producers use and identify the factors that drive their risk...

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...

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,...

Heterogeneity, i.e., the notion that individuals respond differently to economic stimuli, can have profound consequences for the interpretation of behavior and the formulation of agricultural policy. This paper compares and evaluates three grouping techniques that can be used to account for...

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 article tests the efficiency of the hog options market and assesses the impact of the 1996 contract redesign on efficiency. We find that the hog options market is efficient, but some options yielded excess returns during the live hogs period but not during the lean hogs period. Our findings...