The authors examine the performance of the crop insurance scheme in Karnataka, a southern state of India and the second driest state in the country. Their analysis highlights weaknesses in product design, implementation challenges, and operational problems. The authors'finding is that the crop...

Cereal production accounts for about seventy percent of all agricultural land in Morocco. Cereal producer prices, influenced by the government, are higher than world prices. Production is divided into six broad agro-climatic zones. About half of cereal production is concentrated in the...

We examine the optimal hedging strategy with an individual insurance policy, sold at an unfair price, and a fair contract based on an index, which is imperfectly correlated with the individual loss. The tradeoff between transaction costs and basis risk is first analyzed in the expected utility...

The demand for hedging against price uncertainty in the presence of crop yield and revenue insurance contracts is examined for French wheat farms. The rationale for the use of options in addition to futures is first highlighted through the characterization of the first-best hedging strategy in...

This study investigates optimal production and hedging decisions for firms facing price risk that can be hedged with vulnerable contracts, i.e., exposed to nonhedgeable endogenous counterparty credit risk. When vulnerable forward contracts are the only hedging instruments available, the firm's...

This paper analyzes the hedging decisions for firms facing price and basis risk. Two conditions assumed in most models on optimal hedging are relaxed. Hence, (i) the spot price is not necessarily linear in both the settlement price and the basis risk and (ii) futures contracts and options on...

This paper aims to assist policy makers interested in establishing or strengthening financial strategies to increase the financial response capacity of developing country governments in the aftermath of natural disasters, while protecting their long-term fiscal balance. Contingent credit is...

When the indemnity schedule is contingent on the farmer's price and individual yield, an optimal crop revenue insurance contract depends only on the farmer's gross revenue. However, this design is not efficient if, as is the case with available contracts, the coverage function is based on...