The economy of northwest Arkansas, including the Lincoln Lake watershed (a sub-watershed of the Illinois River), relies greatly upon livestock and poultry production. The supply of production by-products is increasingly under scrutiny as one of the potential sources of water pollution in the...

A direct elicitation of utility approach is used to measure risk preferences of commercial sugar cane farmers in the Mzimkulu, Sezela and Eston sugarmill areas of KwaZulu-Natal. Arrow- Pratt absolute risk aversion coefficients are elicited, adjusted for both range and scale of the data, to allow...

Replaced with revised version of paper 06/18/08. Former title: Non-Linearity in Belief and Environmental Risk Dynamics

This paper assesses the impacts of decoupled government transfers on production decisions of a sample of Kansas farms observed from 1996 to 2001. Our model allows for risk, risk attitudes and the intertemporal investment decisions. We also allow for different adjustments of the decision...

Using county level data we study if weather and climate variables or variables used as proxies for rent-seeking behavior determine disaster payment in the Southeast. We do not find evidence of rent-seeking but find that, in addition to weather, long term climate variables affect disaster payments.

We analyze the risks, returns and optimal adoption strategies for a representative Minnesota farm switching from conventional to organic cropping systems. The EPIC simulation model was calibrated based on the yields observed in a farming systems field study. A farm-level simulation model was...

Knowledge of low-income issues in floodplain management is spotty. Repeated flooding resulting from hurricanes striking North Carolina, and most recently Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, has raised concerns that vulnerable low-income communities may be more exposed to the devastating costs of...

In many areas agriculture is exposed to weather-related risks. Weather derivatives that get more and more in the focus of interest can reduce these risks. In this study we develop a temperature based weather derivative and analyse how it can reduce the weather-related energy cost risk in...