The failure of the development of commercially viable traditional crop insurance products and innovations in financial markers has fed a renewed interest in the search for alternatives to help producers in developing countries manage their risk exposure. Salient among these is the proposal of...

Effects of sampling error in estimation of farmers’ mean yields for crop insurance purposes and their implications for actuarial soundness are explored using farm-level corn yield data in Iowa. Results indicate that sampling error, combined with nonlinearities in the indemnity function,...

We examined four evolution paths of the biofuel sector using a partial equilibrium world agricultural sector model in CARD that includes the new RFS in the 2007 EISA, a two-way relationship between fossil energy and biofuel markets, and a new trend toward corn oil extraction in ethanol plants....

A repeated-purchases model is developed to explore the fundamental economic factors that lie behind the choice of different quality assurance systems and their associated degrees of stringency by firms. Differences in the quality discoverability of a sought-after attribute, market structure,...

Hotelling's classic model of spatial competition is adapted to estimate the impacts on grain price of the closure of one of three grain buyers on the Mississippi River in the vicinity of Scott County, Iowa. The customers of the buyer who is closing (River Gulf Grain Company) in Davenport, Iowa,...