The effective design and implementation of interventions that reduce vulnerability and poverty require a solid understanding of underlying poverty dynamics and associated behavioral responses. Stochastic and dynamic benefit streams can make it difficult for the poor to learn the value of such...

The curvature properties of the indirect utility function imply a set of refutable implications in the form of comparative static results and symmetric relations for the competitive firm operating under uncertainty. These hypotheses, first derived and empirically tested under output price...

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...

The material contained herein is supplementary to the article named in the title and published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Volume 88, Number 3, August 2006.

The informational content in live cattle and hog deferred futures prices is assessed using a direct test of incremental forecast ability for two- to twelve-month horizons. For 1976-2007, the results indicate that hog futures prices add incremental information at all horizons, but unique...

The role of price risk in sow farrowings is investigated by using bivariate ARCH-M and GARCH-M models and a nonparametric kernel estimator. To account for the relevant time horizon of irreversible supply decisions, predictions for mean price and conditional price variance are iterated forward....

This article makes an initial attempt to design catastrophe (CAT) bond products for agriculture and examines the potential of these instruments as mechanisms for transferring agricultural risks from insurance companies to investors/speculators in the global capital market. The case of Georgia...

Weather conditions are a primary source of dairy production risk. Hot and humid weather induces heat stress, which reduces lactation. Heat abatement, such as ventilation, directly affects the temperature and humidity. Abatement can increase expected profit, but cannot eliminate the lost revenue...

Soybean rust is a highly mobile infectious disease and can be transmitted across short and long distances. Soybean rust is estimated to cause yield losses that can range between 1%-25%. An analysis of spatio-temporal infection risks within the United States is performed through the use of a...

Risk reduction through diversification across cultivars is evaluated. A case study of peach growers in California shows that cultivar diversity reduces both yield and revenue variability. As a result, the probability of falling below minimum income requirements set using a safety-first model is...