Options on agricultural futures are popular financial instruments used for agricultural price risk management and to speculate on future price movements. Poor performance of Black’s classical option pricing model has stimulated many researchers to introduce pricing models that are more...

This article deals with practical problems of fitting empirical data with generalized lambda distribution. Given method based on moment matching is illustrated on a practical example.

We propose a new method to find spatially adaptive smoothing splines. This new method breaks down the interval [0, 1] into p disjoint sub-intervals. Then we define p functional components in [0, 1], which have two importantfeatures. First, the purpose of each of these p components is to estimate...

Crop insurance performance and loss rates depend directly on underlying crop yield distributions. However, there still exists much debate about how to represent the underlying crop yield distributions. Using farm-level corn and soybean yields from 1972-2008, this study examines in-sample...

Regarding the nature of yield data, there are two basic characteristics that needs to be accommodated while we are about to model a yield distribution. The first one is the nonstationary nature of the yield distribution, which causes the heteroscedasticity related problems. The second one is the...

Generated crop insurance rates depend critically on the distributional assumptions of theunderlying crop yield loss model. Using farm level corn yield data from 1972-2008, we revisitthe problem of examining in-sample goodness-of-fit measures across a set of flexibleparametric, semi-parametric,...

We introduce a new method to robustifying inference that can be applied in any situation where a parametric likelihood is available. The key feature is that data from the postulated parametric models are assumed to be measured with error where the measurement error distribution is chosen to...

In many clinical studies, researchers are mainly interested in studying the effects of some prognostic factors on the hazard of failure from a specific cause while individuals may failure from multiple causes. This leads to a competing risks problem. Often, due to various reasons such as finite...

Inference on treatment effect in a pretest–posttest study is a routine objective in medicine, public health, and other fields, and a number of approaches have been advocated. Typically, subjects are randomized to two treatments, the response is measured at baseline and a prespecified...

A time series analysis was performed on medical scheme statistics with the aim of determining current and future demographic and economic trends. This would enable one to reach a better perspective on the current and future financial dilemma presently experienced by medical schemes. Data for the...