We examine under what conditions setting up a captive insurance company with reinsurance is an optimal solution for risk-averse firms when the insured firm, the insurer and the reinsurer do not know the probability distribution of some risks, and have conflicting estimates of this distribution.

Distributional equity concerns are often at least as important as economic efficiency and ecological sustainability in environmental and natural resource management policies. Until recently, however, economists have shied away from tackling equity issues, primarily because equity appeared as a...

Policy makers aiming to get private landholders to supply non-marketed environmental services may need to provide efficient economic incentives. Two ideas have been explored to achieve this: linking contract payments to environmental outcomes and submitting the contracts to competitive tender....

Buying environmental services from private landholders using tendering mechanisms are usually subject to a budget constraint. Auction theory has mostly focused on target-constrained auctions and is less well developed for this type of auction. This paper examines a theoretical model specifically...

Observed and unobserved characteristics of an individual are often used by researchers to explain choices over the provision of environmental goods. One means for identifying what is typically an unobserved characteristic, such as an attitude, is through some data reduction technique, such as...

In many environmental and conservation policy contexts, gaps are observed between policy objectives and implementation outcomes. Carbon farming policies are designed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but policy success depends on the participation of land managers and their adoption of...

Foreign investment can provide a flow of capital into Australian agriculture and has played an important role meeting the shortfalls in domestic savings throughout Australia’s history. Despite the political and media attention on foreign investment in agriculture, there is little knowledge...

The success of any groundwater management plan depends on user compliance. There is an intimate relationship between regulatory regimes and pumper perceptions. As well as its enforcement powers, an agency's behavior sends information to users. While enforcement power need not always be used to...

The use by farmers of futures contracts and other hedging instruments has been observed to be low in many situations, and this has sometimes seemed to be considered surprising or even mysterious. We propose that it is, in fact, readily understandable and consistent with rational decision making....

Use of lucerne (Medicago sativa L.) pastures in crop rotations has been proposed as a method to enhance weed management options for growers facing herbicide resistance in Western Australia. An existing model for analysing herbicide resistance in the important crop weed annual ryegrass (Lolium...