The prospect of immigration policy reform has renewed growers’ concerns of serious labor shortages and cost increases. These concerns are more serious for specialty crop agriculture, not only because it is highly labor intensive, but also it requires labor in a very short period, particularly...

The objective of this paper is to compare the accuracy of crop insurance rating methods based on historical liability and indemnity data (similar to the procedure currently used by the Risk Management Agency) and “yield distribution” approaches. Estimated rates are compared to “true”...

Exogenous, unobserved factors often confound the effects of alliance networks. More capable farmers might be less likely to exit and more likely to have a large number of alliances. In this case the negative correlation between alliance network size and exit likelihood is due to the unobserved...

In order to more fully study the risks and uncertainty involved in cellulosic ethanol production, we examine a simulated plant in South Louisiana using Real Options Analysis

Replaced with revised version of paper 5/26/11.

This work is a first attempt to analyze the effect of weather derivative availability on the risk management strategies in a multi-period setting, when crop activities take place twice a year. Rice production in Ecuador is used as a case study. Numerical solutions show farmers improve their...

Agricultural insurance is one of the financial tools that agricultural producers can potentially use to cope with increasing risks in their activity. Experiences accumulated on insurance markets demonstrate that the development of a proper agricultural insurance product can not be reached...

The international diversification of assets by investing in agricultural commodities has manifested increasingly in recent years, as demonstrated by the growth in investment in commodities which have augmented rapidly in recent years, the prospect is that they will increase further. The common...