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...

The 50/92 and 0/92 reduced planting alternatives of the 1985 farm bill allow farm program participants more flexibility in making production decisions. Specifically, these provisions relax the incentive to produce inherent in earlier commodity programs that linked deficiency payments directly to...

This paper develops and applies a methodology to assess the accuracy of historical loss-cost rating procedures, similar to those used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency (RMA), versus alternative parametric premium estimation methods. It finds that the accuracy...

We review the implications of the 2007 Farm Bill for the risk management dimensions of U.S. agriculture and policy. Legislative proposals suggest significant changes in risk management policy, including the introduction of state or national revenue insurance. We also pursue an empirical analysis...

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 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...

Producer revenue is simultaneously simulated for several hundred county-specific representative farms. The effects of current and alternative commodity programs are analyzed. In particular, two variations of revenue-triggered programs similar to plans proposed by the National Corn Growers...