Numerous studies have tried to provide a better understanding of firm-level investment behaviour using econometric models. The model specification of more recent studies has been based on two main approaches. The first, the real options approach, focuses on irreversibility and uncertainty in...

In usual pricing approaches for weather derivatives, forward-looking information such as meteorological weather forecasts is not considered. Thus, important knowledge used by market participants is ignored in theory. By extending a standard model for the daily temperature, this paper allows the...

Systemic weather risk is a major obstacle for the formation of private (non-subsidized) crop insurance. This paper explores the possibility of spatial diversication ofinsurance by estimating the joint occurrence of unfavorable weather conditions in dierentlocations. For that purpose copula...

Many business people such as farmers and financial investors are affected by indirect losses caused by scarce or abundant rainfall. Because of the high potential of insuring rainfall risk, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) began trading rainfall derivatives in 2011. Compared to temperature...

Although there is an increasing interest in index-based insurances in many developing countries, crop data scarcity hinders its implementation by forcing insurers to charge higher premiums. Expert knowledge has been considered a valuable information source to augment limited data in insurance...

Systemic weather risk is a major obstacle for the formation of private (non- subsidized) crop insurance. This paper explores the possibility of spatial diversification of insurance by estimating the joint occurrence of unfavorable weather conditions in different locations. For that purpose...

Catastrophic wildfires in California have become more frequent in past decades, while insured losses per event have been rising substantially. On average, California ranks the highest among states in the U.S. in the number of fires as well as the number of acres burned each year. The study of...

Forecasting temperature in time and space is an important precondition for both the design of weather derivatives and the assessment of the hedging effectiveness of index based weather insur-ance. In this article, we show how this task can be accomplished by means of Kriging techniques....

To meet the increasing global demand for renewable energy such as wind energy, more and more new wind parks are installed worldwide. Finding a suitable location, however, requires a detailed and often costly analysis of the local wind conditions. Plain average wind speed maps cannot provide a...

In this paper we adapt a dynamic discrete choice model to examine the aggregated demand for single- and multi-year crop insurance contracts. We show that in a competitive insurance market with heterogeneous risk averse farmers, there is simultaneous demand for both insurance contracts. Moreover,...