The effective design and implementation of interventions that reduce vulnerability and poverty require a solid understanding of underlying poverty dynamics and associated behavioral responses. Stochastic and dynamic benefit streams can make it difficult for the poor to learn the value of such...

This paper develops and applies a methodology to assess the accuracy of historical loss-cost rating procedures, similar to those used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency (RMA), versus alternative parametric premium estimation methods. It finds that the accuracy...

The 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments required that water utilities send quality reports to customers. We test whether receiving such reports of health violations increases purchases of bottled water using newly released data and disaggregate changes in demand at the intensive and...

Recent survey data are examined to improve current understanding of the factors that help to determine the value of information reported on a website that serves as the centerpiece of the USDA’s “Soybean Rust Integrated Pest Management—Pest Information Platform for Extension...

Government financed crop damage compensation (CDC) scheme is covering crop losses in Finland. The scheme is about to be abolished. Crop insurance scheme based on public–private partnership will be in place in 2016. In this study, we analysed how government expenditure will change due to the...

Recent literature shows that deviations from normal rainfall and temperature systematically increase the occurrence of human conflicts. We investigate whether land certification can offset the effect of climate anomalies on land use conflicts. We use a large panel dataset from farm-household...

Kahneman and Tversky’s Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) has proved to be better suited for representing risk preferences than von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Expected Utility Theory (EUT). We argue that neglecting this may explain to some extent why farmers do not contract crop insurance as...

In Finland, water conservation policy sets equal incentive regardless of the condition of the environment. Before any policy reform, it is vital to investigate landowners’ tendency for adoption. In this study we were particularly interested in examining the tendency for adoption if the soil...

The French government and private companies are currently working on a scheme to insure grassland production. Objectives of this study are first to analyse how grassland yield insurance would substitute to self insurance in suckler cow farms and with which effects on profit distribution, second...

The economic literature showed that remittances can replace missing credit and insurance markets. As a result, it is natural to expect that higher amounts of remittances will motivate agricultural farmers to engage in riskier activities. The present study aims to verify the latter hypothesis by...