The demand for insurance is examined when the indemnity schedule is subject to an upper limit. The optimal contract is shown to display full insurance above a deductible up to the cap. Some results derived in the standard model with no upper limit on coverage turn out to be invalid; the optimal...

Public intervention in catastrophe insurance markets, supported by the donor community and the World Bank, should be country specific. Low-income countries, where the domestic non-life insurance market is undeveloped, should focus in the short term on the development of sovereign catastrophe...

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...

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 paper extends the classic expected utility theory analysis of optimal insurance contracting to the case where the insurer has a positive probability of total default and the buyer and insurer have divergent beliefs about this probability. The optimal marginal indemnity above the deductible...

The concept of irreversible investment is applied to highly contagious animal disease control when uncertainty about the spread of the disease is resolved over time. In comparison with the strategy of destroying infected herds, the vaccination programme causes additional losses that cannot be...

The authors provide a conceptual framework for designing a comprehensive risk financing strategy for a firm, using an optimal combination of three instruments: self-retention, contingent debt, and insurance. Using an original conceptual model, the risk management decisions of the firm are first...

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...