The identification of improved methods for characterizing crop yield densities has experienced a recent surge in activity due in part to the central role played by crop insurance in the Agricultural Risk Protection Act of 2000 (estimates of yield densities are required for the determination of...

For multiple peril crop insurance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture'Â’s Risk Management Agency estimates the premium rate for a base coverage level and then uses multiplicative adjustment factors to recover rates at other coverage levels. Given this methodology, accurate estimation of the...

Surprisingly, investigations of adverse selection have focused only on farmers. Conversely, this article investigates if insurance companies, not farmers, can generate excess rents from adverse selection activities. Currently political forces fashioning crop insurance as the cornerstone of U.S....

As traditional forms of agricultural protection continue to decline, agricultural interests will likely seek alternative protection in the form of technical barriers. A flexible framework for theoretically and empirically analyzing technical barriers under various sources of uncertainty is...