Our study focuses on modeling southern pine beetle (SPB) outbreaks in the southern area. The approach is to evaluate SPB outbreak frequency in a spatio-temporal framework. A block bootstrapping method with zero-inflated estimation has been proposed to construct a statistical model accounting for...

Price volatility in the corn market has changed considerably globalization and stronger linkages to the energy complex. Using data from January 1989 through December 2009, we estimate and forecast the volatility in the corn market using futures daily prices. Estimates in a Fractional Integrated...

This paper determines the dynamic interaction between prices of corn, soybean, grain sorghum (milo), wheat, feeder cattle and live (fed) cattle by taking into account the surge in corn consumption stemming from the boost of mandated ethanol production. Corn is a major carbohydrate-feed component...

This study conducts an investigation on the application of classical unit-root tests using parametric tests (the augmented Dickey-Fuller, 1979 – ADF), and nonparametric tests (Phillips and Perron, 1988—PP) to corn and soybean yields in the Delta states using county-level data from 1961 to...

The Neoclassical theory of production establishes a dual relationship between the profit value function of a competitive firm and its underlying production technology. This relationship, usually referred to as the duality theory, has been widely used in empirical work to estimate production...

Major externality cases are random accidents which are not adequately addressed by the deterministic environmental policy literature -­‐ that of Pigouvian taxes, abatement subsidies and cap-­‐and-­‐trade. We consider a risk-­‐neutral industry where firms control the probability...

An important issue in the agricultural actuarial literature is the extent to which sample period selection affects the accuracy of insurance rating. A conditional Weibull distribution approach is developed which explicitly models the interaction of weather, technology, and other variables...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a specific test of Boucher, Carter et al.(2008) framework on risk rationing. The data were collected through a survey of 730farm households in Shaanxi province conducted in November 2010. We comparefactor associated with risk rationed, quantity rationed...

Es ist seit langem bekannt, dass das Wetter den Hauptunsicherheitsfaktor in der pflanzlichen Produktion darstellt. Seit einiger Zeit wird der Einsatz von Wetterderivaten zur Absicherung gegen wetterbedingte Ertragsschwankungen diskutiert. In diesem Beitrag wird am Beispiel ei-nes...

The literature on economic growth and development has focused considerable attention on questions of risk management and the possibility of multiple equilibria associated with poverty traps. We use herd history data collected among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia to study stochastic wealth...