The optimal design of farm policy and public investment in agriculture in the presence of asymmetric information between the government and farmers is studied. It is shown that a mix of capped deficiency payments and voluntary paid land diversion can implement the optimal policy outcome. Optimal...

The standard approach to modelling production under uncertainty has relied on the concept of the stochastic production function. In the present paper, it is argued that a state‐contingent production model is more flexible and realistic. The model is applied to the problem of drought policy.

The central claim of this paper is that the state-contingent approach provides the best way to think about all problems in the economics of uncertainty, including problems of consumer choice, the theory of the firm, and principal–agent relationships. This claim is illustrated by recent...

In the present paper, risk‐management problems where farmers manage risk both through production decisions and through the use of market‐based and informal risk‐management mechanisms are considered. It is shown that many of these problems share a common structure, and that a unified and...

The implementability of area-yield insurance contracts in the presence of symmetric and asymmetric information about the farmer's “beta” linking his yield to the risk-pool's yield is examined. In the presence of fixed costs and symmetric information Mahul's result that optimality requires...

The standard approach to modelling production under uncertainty has relied on the concept of the stochastic production. In this paper, it is argued that a state-contingent production model is more flexible and realistic. The model is applied to the problem of drought policy.

This paper develops an analytically tractable approach to the comparative statics of output subsidies for firms, with monotonic preferences over costs and returns, that face price and production uncertainty. We derive comparative static results for input demand and output supply.

Magill and Quinzii show that for any economy for which the state space is technological (the vector of firms' outputs distinguishes states), there is a security structure consisting of the riskless bond, the equity of each firm, an index of equity contracts and an appropriately-chosen family of...