In 2000, Congress decided to move away from a fixed-dollar-per-acre premium subsidy to a subsidy percentage that applies to any crop insurance product offered. This change reduced the cost to farmers of moving from yield insurance to revenue insurance by more than 50%. In addition, Congress...

In recent years, the organic sector has grown steadily and significantly. However, little economic research has been performed on risk management in organic agriculture, likely because of the lack of available data. This lack of data may also be why the creation of the current crop insurance...

There have long been concerns that federal crop insurance subsidies may significantly impact land use decisions. It is well known that classical insurance market information asymmetry problems can lead to a social excess of risky land entering crop production. We provide a conceptual model to...

Rate setting procedures for United States crop yield and revenue insurance contracts employ methods that presume correlations to be state invariant. Whether this is true matters. If yield-yield correlations strengthen when crops are subject to widespread stress, then diversification...

The Agricultural Risk Protection Act greatly increased the expected marginal net benefit of farmers buying high-coverage crop insurance policies by coupling premium subsidies to coverage level. This policy change, combined with cross-sectional variations in expected marginal net benefits of...

Biofuels production is expanding rapidly all over the world, driven by rising crude oil prices, the desire of countries to be energy independent, and concerns about climate change. As developed countries, especially the United States, are expanding biofuels production, developing countries are...

China's economic reforms, which began in 1978, resulted in remarkable income growth, and urban Chinese consumers have responded by dramatically increasing their consumption of meat, other livestock products, and fruits and by decreasing consumption of grain-based foods. Economic prosperity, a...

A large empirical literature exists seeking to identify crop yield distributions. Consensus has not yet formed. This is in part because of data aggregation problems but also in part because no satisfactory motivation has been forwarded in favor of any distribution, including the normal. This...

In this paper we use 2001-2002 urban survey data we collected to analyze demographics, cultural factors, and purchasing behaviors influencing the consumption of fresh milk, yogurt, ice cream, and powered milk in urban areas of China. The data include frequency of consumption by product, location...

With rapid income growth, dairy production and consumption in China have increased significantly. This emergence of the dairy sector will provide opportunities for farmers to participate in a high-value, potentially more lucrative enterprise. The overall goal of this paper is to analyze the...