The customizable area whole farm insurance (CAWFI) was designed and compared with no insurance program and currently available whole farm insurance based on farm level yield (CFWFI). The CAWFI yields higher certainty equivalents over no insurance program, but lower to CFWFI; CAWFI has fairly...

The objective of this article is to propose the use of moment functions and maximum entropy techniques as a flexible way to estimate conditional crop yield distributions. We present a moment based model that extends previous approaches in several dimensions, and can be easily estimated using...

This paper examines the potential for adverse selection when farmers are offered a portfolio of insurance policies. We analyze the risk characteristics farmers who bought alternative insurance instruments in 1996-97. Inability to differentiate farmers according to risk types results in pooling...

Legislatively mandated declines in government program payments have coincided with sharp declines in most major crop commodity prices. Thus, a debate has begun about the direction of future farm policy. The debate has been largely expressed in terms of a "safety net" for producers. This paper...

The US crop insurance program previously used a simple average of equally weighted historical loss cost data to serve as the backbone for estimating crop insurance premium rates. This article develops a procedure for weighting the historical loss cost experience based on longer time-series...

Many investment decisions of agribusiness firms, such as when to invest in an emerging market or whether to expand the capacity of the firm, involve irreversible investment and uncertainty about demand, cost or competition. This paper uses an option-value model to examine the factors affecting...