This paper develops and applies a methodology to assess the accuracy of historical loss-cost rating procedures, similar to those used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency (RMA), versus alternative parametric premium estimation methods. It finds that the accuracy...

Using data between 1995 and 2010, we find that agricultural banks are benefiting from the derivatives activities by reducing total risk without hurting their profit. In nonagricultural banks, both profitability and total risk are adversely affected, possibly due to speculative derivatives positions.

Precision agriculture and autosteer technology are, overall, profitable investments for farmers, as previous literature has established. However, what has not been investigated is whether or not farmers perceive these technologies as such. This research postulates that cotton farmers must see...

The objective of this study was to examine the economic benefits associated with precision fungicide application system for Florida strawberry production. Given the weather and disease forecast system developed by the University of Florida researchers (Peres, 2010a , strawberry growers can...

We use survey data to study the level of financing constrains faced by new farmers in Alabama post 2008, and identify who got loans. We find that new farmers are financially constrained but not impacted by the crisis. Lending was collateral driven, although lenders also considered profitability...

The paper discusses the context of changing sanitary-phyto-sanitary (SPS) standards, concerns, questions and studies related to food standards and safety,strategic options for developing countries to deal with rising standards, results for case studies on compliance costs, benefits and...

The 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments required that water utilities send quality reports to customers. We test whether receiving such reports of health violations increases purchases of bottled water using newly released data and disaggregate changes in demand at the intensive and...

We investigate biases in farm-level yield risk analysis caused by data aggregation from the farm-level to regional and national levels using the example of Swiss wheat and barley yields. The estimated yield variability decreases significantly with increasing level of aggregation, with crop yield...