This article explores the impact of the likely levels of inaccuracy associated with two main types of premium estimation methods, under different sample sizes, on the actuarial performance of the US crop insurance program. The analyses are conducted under several plausible assumptions about the...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/22/11.

Prevalence of local foods is believed to answer several food issues one of which is health and nutrition. This study focused on the on the availability of local foods to consumers and see its relationship with two specific diet-related diseases namely, obesity and diabetes. Other variables were...

Immigration reform is the most polarizing legislative issues in the US. Surprisingly, despite regular polling evidence of the American public's attitudes towards immigration reform proposals, little evidence has elicited the preferences of the group most affected by any policy changes - legal...

We apply the Distributional Event Response Model (DERM), which is appropriate in studying relatively slowly-evolving information events, to nineteen years of daily crude oil futures returns and volatility to analyze the pattern of market responses to selected events. The results show that all...

Simulation methods are used to measure the expected differentials between the Mean Square Errors of the forecasts from models based on temporally disaggregated versus aggregated data. This allows for novel comparisons including long-order ARMA models, such as those expected with weekly data,...

Obtaining reliable estimates of insurance premiums is a critical step in risk sharing and risk transfer necessary to ensure solvency and continuity in crop insurance programs. Challenges encountered in the estimation include dealing with aggregation bias from using county level yield averages as...