Weather risk is a serious issue in the African small farm sector, which will further aggravate due to climate change. Farmers typically react by using low amounts of agricultural inputs. Low input use can help to minimize financial loss in bad years, but is also associated with low average yield...

The agriculture sector observed the penetration of parametric weather risk financial products, including weather index insurance and weather derivatives, between the late 1990s and the early 2000s. However, the adoption of such products remains low. While the reasons for low adoption are...

The present dissertation is twofold and takes up several issues in two separate and independent articles. In chapter II, the hedging effectiveness of weather index-based insurance with regard to aggregation biases in the underlying risk exposure of aggregated yield time series is presented. The...

The mad cow disease crisis in the United Kingdom (U.K.) was a major policy disaster. The government and public health officials failed to identify the risk to humans, created tremendous uncertainty regarding the human risks once they were identified, and undertook a series of policies that...

Nanotechnology is becoming increasingly important for the food sector, and advances and products are already being made in the areas of food packaging and food safety. However, there are several potential issues associated with the commercialization of agricultural and food (agrifood)...

This paper extends the analysis of insurance contracts design to the case of "low probability events", when there is a probability mass on the event "no accident-zero loss". The optimality of the deductible clause is discussed both at the theoretical and empirical levels.

L’article développe l’analyse de la structure optimale des contrats d’assurance, dans le cas des "événements à faible probabilité", c’est-à-dire, lorsqu’il existe une masse de probabilité sur l’événement sans accident. On discute l’optimalité de la clause de franchise à...

This study examines how, in the context of three major crop insurance legislative initatives by the US government in 1989, 1994, and 2000, regulatory and other innovations to the federal crop insurance program have been designed to jointly benefit farm interest groups and the agricultural...

Weather risk is a serious issue in the African small farm sector, which will further aggravate due to climate change. Farmers typically react by using low amounts of agricultural inputs. Low input use can help to minimize financial loss in bad years, but is also associated with low average yield...