The vast majority of crop and revenue insurance policies sold in the United States are single-crop policies that insure against low yields or low revenues for each crop grown on a particular farm. This practice of insuring one crop at a time runs counter to the traditional risk management...

A wide variety of insurance products is available to agricultural producers to insure against yield or price risks in the markets for the raw commodities they produce. Value-added enterprises, such as ethanol production, have been expanding over the last decade. This paper outlines the...

Increased crop insurance subsidies have increased the demand for insurance at coverage levels higher than the traditional level of 65 percent. Premium rates for higher levels of yield insurance under the Federal Actual Production History (APH) program equal the premium rate at the 65 percent...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/29/10.

A variety of crop revenue insurance programs have recently been introduced. A critical component of revenue insurance contracts is quantifying the risk associated with stochastic prices. Forward-looking, market-based measures of price risk which are often available in form of options premia are...

The objective of this study is to evaluate and model the yield risk associatedwith major agricultural commodities in the U.S. We are particularly concernedwith the nonstationary nature of the yield distribution, which primarily arisesbecause of technological progress and changing environmental...

The extent to which crop insurance programs have resulted in additional land being brought into production has been a topic of considerable debate. We extend a multi-equation structural model of crop acreage response, insurance participation, CRP enrollment, and input usage developed in Goodwin...

In the US forestry industry, wildfire has always been one of the leading causes of damage. This topic is of growing interest as wildfire has caused huge losses for landowners, residents and governments in recent years. While individual wildfire behavior is well studied (e.g. Butry 2009; Holmes...

This paper discusses the volatility spillover effects in agricultural commodity markets, via studying implied volatilities derived from nearby options contracts. Using weekly averaged data from corn and soybean markets after 2003, a vector autoregressive (VAR) model is estimated, and impulse...

Our study focuses on modeling southern pine beetle (SPB) outbreaks in the southern area. The approach is to evaluate SPB outbreak frequency in a spatio-temporal framework. A block bootstrapping method with zero-inflated estimation has been proposed to construct a statistical model accounting for...