This study uses a large increase in US Federal crop insurance subsidies as a natural experiment to identify the importance of risk for farm operator labour supply. Subsidy increases induced greater crop insurance coverage, which in turn reduced farmers' financial risks. Crop insurance...

We estimate how much United States farms changed enterprise diversification in response to a marked increase in crop insurance coverage brought about by the 1994 Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act, which substantially increased insurance subsidies. The analysis exploits farm-level panel census...

Solar and wind power are now cheaper than fossil fuels but are intermittent. The extra supply-side variability implies growing benefits of using real-time retail pricing (RTP). We evaluate the potential gains of RTP using a model that jointly solves investment, supply, storage, and demand to...

Farm-level Census data and county-level income shock data reveal that past unexpected income shocks affect the rate of change in average farm size. Average farm size increases more quickly in counties experiencing negative income shocks as compared to counties experiencing positive income...

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...

Farm income is highly variable due to annual price and yield uncertainties. The federally subsidized crop insurance program is an important tool for managing this risk, and has grown from a relatively modest program to one that encompasses the majority of productive cropland in the country. The...

Water reallocation to meet mandated flow requirements and trust responsibilities, established in Federal law and water authority, can result in large uncompensated losses to irrigated agriculture. This paper discusses the nature and potential cost of water-supply interruptions due to Federal...

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...

In a series of studies employing a variety of approaches, we have found that the potential impact of climate change on US agriculture is likely negative. Deschênes and Greenstone (2007) report dramatically different results based on regressions of agricultural profits and yields on weather...