The paper discusses a methodology for design and pricing of index insurance contracts for crop production. The methodology heavily relies on establishing a relationship between the index and yields in order to evaluate the contract performance in hedging farmers' risk. However, analysis of...

The paper investigates the linkages between technological change and production risk, with an application to corn. The effects of technology on risk exposure are characterized based on the properties of the risk premium. We define technological progress to be risk-increasing (risk-decreasing) if...

Economic analyses of pests typically assume damage is either additively separable from pest free yield or proportional to it. This paper describes the ecological assumptions required for additive and proportional damage functions to demonstrate that both specifications are reasonable. Ecological...

The extent to which crop insurance programs have resulted in additional land being brought into production has been a topic of considerable debate. We extend a multi-equation structural model of crop acreage response, insurance participation, CRP enrollment, and input usage developed in Goodwin...

This paper revisits the issue of crop yield distributions using improved model specifications, estimation and testing procedures that address the methodological concerns raised in recent literature that could have invalidated previous conclusions of yield non-normality. It shows beyond...

This paper uses publicly available data from the California Department of Pesticide Regulation to measure local and industry peer eects related to the adoption of blueberries as a crop among Cal- ifornia growers between the years 2001 and 2011. Geographic and inter-industry network analyses...

The purpose of this paper is to determine the socioeconomic factors that influence the behavior of adoption of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) by Quebec grain farmers. Using an econometric model of discrete choice, ordered logit model, the results show that majority of Quebec grain producers...