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...

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...

This article examines the efficiency of wind energy production. We quantify production losses in four wind parks across Germany for 19 wind turbines with non-convex efficiency analysis. In a second stage regression, we adapt the linear regression results of Kneip, Simar, Wilson (2014) to explain...

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....

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...

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...

In 2007 and 2008 world food markets observed a significant price boom. Crop failures simultaneously occurring in some of the world’s major production regions have been quoted as one factor among others for the price boom. Against this background, we analyse the stochasticity of crop yields in...

The supply of affordable crop insurance is hampered by the existence of systemic weather risk which results in large risk premiums. In this article, we assess the systemic nature of weather risk for 17 agricultural production regions in China and explore the possibility of spatial...

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...