This paper develops and illustrates the application of a procedure to evaluate and compare the cost effectiveness of alternative crop insurance products for cotton in terms of their effect on expected producer net returns and the variation of net returns. Farm unit-level cotton yields and...

We demonstrate the use of the small-sample econometrics principles and strategies to come up with reliable yield and acreage models for policy analyses. We focus on demonstrating the importance of proper representation of systematic and random components of the model for improving forecasting...

This study presents a way to parametrically model and simulate multivariate distributions under potential non-normality, autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity and illustrates its application to agricultural risk analysis. Specifically, the joint probability distribution (pdf) for West Texas...

The behavior of agricultural commodity markets can arguably result in markedly asymmetric price cycles, that is, downward cycles of substantially different length and breadth than upward cycles. This study assesses whether asymmetric-cycle models can enhance the understanding of the dynamics and...

Production function models for cotton lint yields, seed yields, turnout, and lint quality characteristics are developed for the Texas High Plains. They are used to evaluate the impacts of quality considerations and of climate/weather information on the management decisions and on the...

The distributions currently used to model and simulate crop yields are unable to accommodate a substantial subset of the theoretically feasible mean-variance-skewness-kurtosis (MVSK) hyperspace. Because these first four central moments are key determinants of shape, the available distributions...

Evaluations of the factors influencing the adoption of agricultural and natural resource management technologies among small farmers in developing countries have been mostly limited to qualitative discussions or simple descriptive statistics resulting in superficial and inconclusive findings....