Land Use Rights (LURs) in China affect farmers' productivity through investment incentives and the way land is allocated across households. LURs have implication and trade-offs between equity and growth. This paper examines how Chinese farmers might respond if the Chinese government made it...

In this paper, we investigate how Itô's excursion theory can be usefully applied to economic time series data (Itô 2007). We relate excursion theory to geometric and fractional Brownian motion and the Hurst coefficient. We then calculate the Hurst coefficient for all stocks on the DOW 30, S&P...

This paper illustrates how weather derivatives indexed to forecasts of famine can be designed and used by operational agencies and donors to facilitate timely and reliable financing for effective emergency response to climate-based, slow-onset disasters such as drought. We provide a general...

How would a possible food safety scare influence food consumption? Using techniques from experimental psychology, a study of 103 lunchtime participants suggests that a food scare -- avian influenza -- would decrease food by 17% if they believed it was naturally occurring and by 26% if they...

The objective of this paper is to frame the key issues and summarize the current state of knowledge about and innovations in index-based risk transfer products (IBRTPs) as they relate to the management of climate risk for poverty reduction, especially of chronic or persistent poverty. In the...

This paper provides an overview of concepts, issues and research on the relationship between financial inclusion and inclusive rural transformation. When considering how the growth of demand for financial services is related to the broader processes of structural and rural transformation, the...

1 China’s Agriculture in the 1930s: An Overview -- 2 John Lossing Buck and Land Utilization in China -- 3 Calamities and Conflict Affecting Rural China 1929–1933 -- 4 The Discovery and Restoration of Buck’s Original Data -- 5 Reliability of John Lossing Buck’s Land Utilization Survey...

This paper employs mean-variance and mean-skewness optimization to investigate farmers' crop choices under Gross Revenue Insurance (GRIP), Whole Farm Income Insurance, the Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program, and its modified 2008 program AgrInvest. To our knowledge this paper is...