Nearly all farm business ventures involve financial risk. In some instances, private and public tools used to manage financial risks in agriculture may influence farmers' production decisions. These decisions, in turn, can influence environmental quality. This bulletin summarizes research and...

Early-warning systems for plant diseases are valuable when the systems provide timely forecasts that farmers can use to inform their pest management decisions. To evaluate the value of the systems, this study examines, as a case study, USDA’s coordinated framework for soybean rust...

We use a large increase in Federal crop insurance subsidies as a natural experiment to identify the impact of risk on acreage and diversification decisions. Subsidy increases induced greater crop insurance coverage, which reduced farmers' financial risks. Did this change in the risk environment...

This paper presents preliminary evidence on the effect of crop insurance on fertilizer and chemical inputs in agriculture. Our estimates are based on two sources of identification that emerge from a policy change concerning insurance subsidies that approximately doubled total premiums and the...

We use administrative data from the Federal crop insurance program to examine how yield distributions change as farmers cycle into and out of the program. We are able to do this by linking many years of crop insurance data by individual farm conditioning observed yields on the particular county...

We use a large increase in Federal crop insurance subsidies as a natural experiment to identify the impact of risk on acreage and diversification decisions. Subsidy increases induced greater crop insurance coverage, which reduced farmers' financial risks. Did this change in the risk environment...

This paper presents preliminary evidence on the effect of crop insurance on fertilizer and chemical inputs in agriculture. Our estimates are based on two sources of identification that emerge from a policy change concerning insurance subsidies that approximately doubled total premiums and the...

This report analyzes farmers' choice of crop insurance contracts and tests for the presence of asymmetric information in the market for multiple yield and revenue insurance products. Farmers' risk characteristics, their level of income, and the cost of insurance significantly affect their...