The curvature properties of the indirect utility function imply a set of refutable implications in the form of comparative static results and symmetric relations for the competitive firm operating under uncertainty. These hypotheses, first derived and empirically tested under output price...

The paper considers the benefit to agricultural producers from commodity price insurance that provides in every year, but in advance of the resolution of production and price uncertainty, a minimum price for a fixed or variable portion of production. Under the assumption that producers do not...

Insuring against crop yield risk is an important task in rural microfinance because such an insurance may improve access to capital for smallholders by substituting for collaterals. However, agricultural crop yield risk is even hard to mitigate in developed countries due to problems of...

In this paper 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 decorrelation analysis is...

Recent academic discussion regarding crop insurance in developing and transition countries has focused on weather index insurance. But empirical analyses of such schemes based on farm level data cannot be found in the literature, though this insurance type shows clear advantages compared to...

By altering the probability distribution of farm income, crop insurance programs affect farmer's input use decision. Ramaswami's (1993) one-shock model analyzed the effect of the crop insurance on single input use by allowing the randomness of yield while keeping price constant in revenue...

The objective of this paper is to investigate the performance of different VaR models in the context of risk assessment in hog production. Potential pitfalls of traditional VaR models are pinpointed and proposals to solve them are analyzed. After a brief description these methods are used to...

Risk theory tells us if an insurer can effectively pool a large number of individuals to reduce the total risk, he then can provide the insurance by charging a premium close to the actuarially fair rate. There is, however, a common belief that the risk can be effectively pooled only when the...

We argue that existing agricultural insurance valuation models are limited either because they are not complete equilibrium models that price the non-diversifiable risk involved in issuing insurance contracts, or they assume complete markets which appears at odds with most applications of...

Producers have a wide variety of risk management instruments available. How do producers make a choice of risk management instruments? Using the recently developed choice bracketing framework, we examine what risk management strategies producers use and identify the factors that drive their risk...