Purpose – The purpose of this research is to investigate the degree to which trends and structural change may have altered crop insurance expected loss cost ratios across time. Because loss experience is used to set rates for the program, these changes can impact the premiums paid by producers...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to be an academic inquiry into rating issues confronted by the US Federal Crop Insurance program stemming from changes in participation rates as well as the weighting of data to reflect longer-run weather patterns. Design/methodology/approach – The...

We combine household-level data on the choice to purchase flood insurance with experiment-based risk preference data and subjective risk perception data. The sample covers a wide geographic area (the entire U.S. Gulf Coast and Florida's Atlantic Coast) and includes individuals exposed to varying...

The US crop insurance program previously used a simple average of equally weighted historical loss cost data to serve as the backbone for estimating crop insurance premium rates. This article develops a procedure for weighting the historical loss cost experience based on longer time-series...

Many investment decisions of agribusiness firms, such as when to invest in an emerging market or whether to expand the capacity of the firm, involve irreversible investment and uncertainty about demand, cost or competition. This paper uses an option-value model to examine the factors affecting...

Producers’ increased reliance on crop insurance has led to concerns about losses producers could incur that are not covered by crop insurance. In the current farm bill debate, several proposals that would be based on area (county) revenue and are intended to cover a portion of producers’...

This study examines U.S. crop producers’ perceptions of climate change, its effects on crop agriculture, and likely ways farmers would adapt to weather extremes. Based on a survey of crop producers in four states, we find that a significant proportion of farmers do not perceive that...

We develop a real options framework to model producer participation in a subsidy program as a human capital investment to learn how the stochastic subsidy affects returns and how to adapt production activities to new program incentives, formally linking the framework to a multinomial logit...

The 2008 Farm Bill created the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program to be a new commodity support program. Using a multinomial logit model to analyze a mail survey administered before the ACRE sign-up deadline, we identify factors driving farmer intentions regarding ACRE participation....