The influence of climate variability on agricultural production and financial risks faced by an individual or an institution has been the center of the public discussion in the recent years. The changing weather patterns and environmental conditions could cause substantial unpredicted economic...

According to the Taiwan Council of Agriculture, frost was responsible for approximately 30 percent of aquaculture losses in Taiwan during the period 1999-2008. Farmed milkfish, the most important aquaculture crop in Taiwan, is particularly sensitive to temperature variations, and can experience...

The Global Food Price Crisis of 2007-2011 had mixed effects on the poor in developing nations. By some estimates, the Crisis lifted nearly 24 million poor farmers out of poverty; however, it also cast 68 million net food buyers into poverty. In this paper, we analyze the distributional impacts...

Empirical evidence for the existence of moral hazard in the U.S. crop insurance program has been inconclusive. Here, we seek empirical evidence of moral hazard in the U.S. crop insurance program, departing from the established empirical literature in two significant respects. First, we attempt...

Very little attention has been given to the modeling of yield distribution for crops and regions in which yields exhibit irregular behavior. We undertake a statistical case study of Texas upland cotton and propose an alternative mixture distribution based on regime-switching model in which the...