The effective design and implementation of interventions that reduce vulnerability and poverty require a solid understanding of underlying poverty dynamics and associated behavioral responses. Stochastic and dynamic benefit streams can make it difficult for the poor to learn the value of such...

The extent to which crop insurance programs have resulted in additional land being brought into production has been a topic of considerable debate. We extend a multi-equation structural model of crop acreage response, insurance participation, CRP enrollment, and input usage developed in Goodwin...

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...

Cattle feeding enterprises operate amid variability originating in prices and production. Thisresearch explicitly models yield risks related to cattle feeding by relating the mean and varianceof yield performance factors to observable conditioning variables. The results demonstratethat pen...

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/24/07.

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...

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...

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...

Most, if not all, production technologies are stochastic. This article demonstrates how data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods can be adapted to accommodate stochastic elements in a state-contingent setting. Specifically, we show how observations on a random input, not under the control of the...

It is likely that climate change will be associated with reductions in inflows of water to the Murray–Darling Basin. In this study, we analyse the effects of climate change in the Murray–Darling Basin using a simulation model that incorporates a state-contingent representation of...