Questions relating to the allocation and management of risk have played a central role in the development of the National Water Initiative, particularly as it has applied to the Murray-Darling Basin. The central issues of efficiency and equity in allocations are best understood by considering...

Replaced with revised version of paper 11/18/08.

Risk aversion is well established in the health and safety literature, and ambiguity is addressed in theoretical and experimental economics literature, but few theoretically-consistent empirical models addressing the relationship between ambiguity, risk, and preferences exist. Even fewer address...

This article extends the literature on economic valuation of public interventions that reduce environmental risk. We consider the case where risk-reducing interventions have different characteristics than the risk proxies used in hedonic regressions. We then demonstrate the importance of these...

Agriculture operates in an uncertain environment. Yields, prices, and resource usage can change dramatically from year to year. However, most analyses of the agricultural sector, at least those using mathematical programming methods, assume decision making is based on average yields, ignoring...

As contractual agriculture expands, contract design offers a non-regulatory opportunity to reduce non-point source pollution. A risk programming analysis of seed corn contract designs illustrates a tractable empirical principal-agent model, and shows that grower risk preferences affect contract...

In many areas agriculture is exposed to weather related risks. Weather derivatives that get more and more in the focus of interest can reduce these risks. In this study we develop a temperature based weather derivative and analyse how it can reduce the weather-related energy cost risk in...

This study is an extension of the earlier study with a focus on the impact of the El Nino induced weather changes at the regional and farm levels. It provides a complete continuum of the impacts and implications of El Nino from the national to the regional and farm levels. Hence, the general...