Lack of protection from downside risk has been posited as one explanation for sluggish technology uptake among subsistence agricultural households in the developing world. Access to credit and insurance is thought to be a stimulant to technology adoption where new methods are riskier but higher...

This paper investigates the farm-household decisions of adopting and abandoning higher-productivity technologies, under different scenarios of inclusion into the credit and deposit markets. The financial environment is further characterized by shallow financial markets, represented by a...

In this paper, we examine how China, the world’s largest rice producer and consumer, would affect the international rice market if it liberalized its trade in rice and became more fully integrated into the global rice market. The impacts of trade liberalization are estimated using a...

This book presents a variety of computational methods used to solve dynamic problems in economics and finance. It emphasizes practical numerical methods rather than mathematical proofs and focuses on techniques that apply directly to economic analyses. The examples are drawn from a wide range of...

This paper discusses how numerical techniques may be used to solve the simultaneous functional equations that arise in general dynamic stochastic games. Unlike the conventional linear-quadratic approach, our methods may be used to address general model specifications that may include...

We examine how farm characteristics affect marketing contract decisions. We relax the restrictive assumptions of Tobit, Poisson, and multinomial logit models and consider the quantity, frequency, and contract type decisions conditional on, rather than jointly with, the contract adoption...

We show how to solve the stochastic spatial-temporal price equilibrium model numerically using the Chebychev collocation method. We then use the model to analyze the joint and interactive stabilizing effects of competitive storage and trade.

The paper presents an economic analysis of the Standard Reinsurance Agreement (SRA), the contract that governs the relationship between the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation and the private insurance companies that deliver crop insurance products to farmers. The paper outlines provisions of the...

We propose a method for solving continuous-state and action-stochastic dynamic programs that is a hybrid between the continuous space projection methods introduced by Judd and the discrete space methods introduced by Bellman. Our hybrid approach yields a smooth representation of the value...