Using data for 2002-2005 on a representative survey of French farms (FADN-RICA), we investigate the different factors that lead farmers to insure against crop risk. Our analysis takes into account a mix of both standard individual, financial and agricultural criteria. Cross-sectional and...

Crop insurance products can improve and stabilize economic performance. However, due to insurance market imperfections, the use of insurance products often requires governmental support. This paper analyses the actual impact of insurance products on the economic performance of cropping farms by...

The paper evaluates the effectiveness of several index-based crop insurance schemes by comparing results from two alternative evaluation approaches. We apply the common ex post approach from the literature by specifying and evaluating insurance contracts by means of the data for the same...

High losses generated by natural catastrophes reduce the availability of insurance. Among the ways to manage risk, the subscriptions of participating and non-participating contracts respectively permit to implement the two major principles in risk allocation: the mutuality and the transfer...

The study introduces an ex-ante evaluation concept into the analysis of weather-based index insurance effectiveness. We conduct our ex ante analysis by distinguishing between two consecutive periods: the first period is used for determining insurance parameters and optimal number of insurance...

The study evaluates the effectiveness of a catastrophic drought-index insurance developed by applying two alternative methods - the standard regression analysis and the copula approach. Most empirical analyses obtain estimates of the dependence of crop yields on weather by employing linear...

The application of yield time series in risk analysis prerequisites the estimation of technological trend which might be present in the data. In this paper, we show that in presence of highly volatile yield time series and non-constant technology, the consideration of the weather effect in the...

Volatility of farm income represents a major challenge for farm management and the design of public policies. This paper measures the extent to which risk management tools, especially direct payments and crop insurance, can significantly reduce crop income volatility in France and in Italy. We...