Replaced with revised version of paper 06/17/08.

In this article we price a precipitation option based on empirical weather data from Germany using different pricing methods, among them Burn Analysis, Index Value Simulation and Daily Simulation. For that purpose we develop a daily precipitation model. Moreover, a de-correlation analysis is...

Systemic weather risk is a major obstacle for the formation of private (nonsubsidized) crop insurance. This paper explores the possibility of spatial diversification of insurance by estimating the joint occurrence of unfavorable weather conditions in different locations. For that purpose copula...

The existing literature on dynamic efficiency is deterministic and ignores uncertainty when deriving dynamic efficiency measures, even though it is known that uncertainty affects the optimal adjustment path and the optimal use of quasi-fixed factors. Here, we contribute to closing this gap by...

Although there is an increasing interest in index-based insurances in many developing countries, crop data scarcity hinders its implementation by forcing insurers to charge higher premiums. Expert knowledge has been considered a valuable information source to augment limited data in insurance...

This paper examines the impact of technical efficiency on the optimal exit timing of farms in a stochastic dynamic framework. Starting from a standard real options approach, we incorporate technical efficiency via a production function and derive an optimal price trigger at which farms...

Yield variability can be significantly higher at the farm level than at more aggregated levels, including the county. However, due to a dearth of available farm level data, much stochastic analysis involving farm yields utilizes more aggregated yield data as a proxy for the farm level. We...

This study takes the standard acreage response model that stems from an expected utility framework, accounting for both price and yield variability, and nests it within a flexible semi-nonparametric (SNP) model consistent with farm-level decision models for computationally tractable results. We...