Cash-futures basis, a proxy for arbitrage opportunities, is examined, and the impact of informed trading and the changing roles of speculators and arbitrageurs are analyzed in both the non-expiration and near-expiration periods. While we observe that market frictions account to some extent for...

Index insurance products circumvent many of the transaction costs and asymmetric information problems that obstruct provision of low value conventional insurance policies in developing countries. Recent years have seen tremendous growth in index insurance pilots in developing countries, but...

Basis risk has been cited as a primary concern for implementing weather hedges. This study investigates several dimensions of weather basis risk for the U.S. corn market at various levels of aggregation. The results suggest that while the degree of geographic basis risk may be significant in...

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. Demand is...

This paper presents a technical note on Mexico’s Financial Sector Assessment Program update. The Sociedad Hipotecaria Federal has successfully led a range of direct policy measures that have stimulated the development of the housing finance market. The government improved the legal...

The key findings of Australia’s BASEL II implementation assessment are presented. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) allocated sufficient resources, including highly skilled staff, prior to the Basel II start date, and the outcome has been a robust and high-quality...

We implement the theoretical models of input hedging. In doing so, we provide decisive results regarding the marginal impact of the basis risk on the optimal hedge, hedge ratio and hedge position.

Risk management is gaining importance in agriculture. In addition to traditional instruments, new risk management instruments are increasingly being proposed. These proposals include the rent adjustment clauses (RACs), which seem to be an unusual instrument at first sight. In contrast with...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of industry loss warranties (ILWs), an alternative risk transfer instrument which has become increasingly popular throughout the last few years. Design/methodology/approach – The authors first point out key characteristics...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper to develop an empirical methodology for managing spatial basis risk in weather index insurance by studying the fundamental causes for differences in weather risk between distributed locations. Design/methodology/approach – The paper systematically compares...