Optimal Producer Behavior in the Presence of Area-Yield Crop Insurance

Optimal producer behavior in the presence of area-yield insurance is studied. The producer's optimal production and insurance choices are characterized. The effect of the provision of area-yield insurance on production patterns is studied, and sufficient conditions for the provision of area-yield insurance to increase the riskiness of the individual producer's decisions are derived. A separation result is derived for area-yield insurance contracts and stochastic technologies.     

AN ANALYSIS OF WILLINGNESS-TO-PAY FOR CROP INSURANCE*

In this paper a method for estimating a producer's willingness-to-pay for crop insurance is presented. The method includes formulae to capture the impact of crop insurance on the producer's expected income and variance of income. These impacts are evaluated in the context of a model of producer welfare which features both price and yield uncertainty, as well as risk aversion on the part of the producer. The method is applied to the Australian wheat industry and estimates of willingness-to-pay are shown to be relatively sensitive to the levels of coverage and yield variability.     

EC AGRICULTURAL SURPLUSES AND BUDGET CONTROL

Attempts to limit the EC agricultural budget have focussed on the problem of controlling surpluses of agricultural products. An alternative strategy is to impose cash limits directly on specific agricultural support expenditures. This paper shows that the coresponsibility measures favoured by the Commission could, with minor modification, become vehicles for cash limit control of support expenditure, but the penalties for over-production would have to be more severe than in the past. Cash-limiting policy options are compared in terms of producer incentives and their effect on producer revenues.     

Optimal Insurance Against Climatic Experience

An optimal insurance contract against a climatic risk is derived in the presence of an uninsurable and dependent aggregate production risk. The optimal design depends on the stochastic dependency between both sources of uncertainty and on the producer's attitude towards risk, especially on his prudent behavior. Rational weather insurance purchasing decisions are also derived. The prudent producer responds to actuarially fair weather insurance by increasing his exposure towards risk.     

Hedging dairy production losses using weather-based index insurance

This article proposes a temperature–humidity index insurance product and examines whether this product can effectively protect against the risk of reduced milk production caused by heat stress. Results suggest that even when premiums are at higher than actuarially fair levels and the insurance purchaser is faced with both spatial and temporal basis risks, a temperature–humidity index insurance product would provide risk management benefits to a representative south‐central Georgia dairy producer.     

Warming temperatures will likely induce higher premium rates and government outlays for the U.S. crop insurance program

Likely climate change impacts include damages to agricultural production resulting from increased exposure to extreme heat. Considerable uncertainty remains regarding impacts on crop insurance programs. We utilize a panel of U.S. corn yield data to predict the effect of warming temperatures on the mean and variance of yields, as well as crop insurance premium rates and producer subsidies. While we focus on corn, we demonstrate that the subsidy impacts are likely to carry over to other major program crops. We find that warming decreases mean yields and increases yield risk on average, which results in higher premium rates. Under a 1°C warming scenario, we find that premium rates at the 90% coverage level will increase by 39% on average; however, there is considerable statistical uncertainty around this average as the 95% confidence interval spans from 22% to 61%. We also find evidence of extensive cross‐sectional differences as the county‐level rate impacts range from a 10% reduction to a 63% increase. Results indicate that exposure to extreme heat and changes in the coefficient of variation are large drivers of the impacts. Under the 1°C warming scenario, we find that annual subsidy payments for the crop insurance program could increase by as much as $1.5 billion, representing a 22% increase relative to current levels. This estimate increases to 3.7 billion (57%) under a 2°C warming scenario. Our results correspond to a very specific counterfactual: the marginal effect of warming temperatures under current technology, production, and crop insurance enrollments. These impacts are shown to be smaller than the forecasted impacts under a commonly used end‐of‐century general circulation model for even the most optimistic CO₂ emissions projection.     

影响设施农产品质量安全生产的行为因素分析一一以北疆设施生产者调查为例

新疆设施农业发展带来的经济效益日益突出。但最近几年,由于农药、添加剂、植物生长激素滥用以及环境污染等造成的农产品安全问题相当严重。本文主要研究新疆设施农产品质量安全问题,对北疆设施生产者进行实地调查,利用Logistic模型,对影响设施农产品质量安全生产的行为因素进行分析,结果表明：生产者是确保设施农产品质量安全的第一负责人,他们的行为直接影响着农产品的质量安全,目前,新疆设施生产者具有安全生产意愿,但由于家庭收入、市场机制不健全、技术指导的缺乏等原因,仍存在不安全的生产行为。通过生产者的生产行为,结合实际提出相应的对策建议,从而改善生产者的行为并加强控制,更好的发展设施农业。     

Constrained Efficient Contracts for Area Yield Crop Insurance

With area yield crop insurance, indemnification occurs when area yield falls below a yield trigger that is chosen by the producer. The maximum value for this yield trigger is generally restricted (e.g., 80% of the long term area average yield). The impact of this trigger constraint on the optimal design of an area yield insurance contract is examined. Within the constrained efficient contract, indemnities consist of both a lump sum payment and a payment that is proportional to the yield shortfall. Because lump sum payments may not be feasible to implement, efficiency-enhancing modifications to standard contracts are also proposed.     

Understanding the Economic Factors Influencing Farm Policy Preferences

A survey conducted in Mississippi, Texas, Indiana, and Nebraska elicited producers' preferences for various farm policy changes. This permitted examination of the diversity of preferences that single-state studies have not allowed. Five policy choices, including deficiency payments, loan programs, crop insurance, export programs, and disaster payments were examined. Logit model results predicting producer preferences for each of the five dichotomous policy choices are reported. Explanatory variables based on expected utility theory such as risk aversion, price and yield variability, and price–yield correlation are significant in various models.     

Political Market Power Reflected in Milk Pricing Regulations

We investigate revealed political market power reflected in the pattern of price discrimination by end use that is the hallmark of U.S. milk marketing orders. We show that the pattern of prices that would maximize producer profits, if producers operated a cartel with monopoly power in a regional market, is far above actual government-set price differentials between milk used for fluid products and that used for manufactured products. The pattern of actual price differentials is consistent with political welfare weights for producers relative to consumers that are small compared to the weights that would yield maximum producer profits.     

Actuarial Fairness of Crop Insurance Rates with Constant Rate Relativities

Increased availability and demand for low-deductible crop insurance policies have increased focus on crop insurance rating methods. Actuarial fairness cannot be achieved if constant multiplicative factors are used to determine how premiums change as coverage levels increase. A comparison of premium rates generated by the factors used by the two most popular crop insurance products with those generated by a standard yield distribution shows that the popular insurance products overcharge for low-deductible policies in most counties. This overpricing may explain why large premium subsidies were required to induce farmers to move from low-deductible to high-deductible policies beginning in 2001.     

Calibration of agricultural risk programming models using positive mathematical programming

Mathematical programming models of farmers’ cropping decisions must first be calibrated before they can be used to examine agricultural producer responses to policy changes. In this paper, we compare three calibration approaches for disentangling the risk parameter from the parameters of the cost function: one assumes a logarithmic utility function, while the others employ an exponential utility function. Historical crop insurance data for southern Alberta, Canada, are used to assess the calibration performance of the three approaches, and sensitivity analysis is implemented to test whether the changes in the optimal land allocation caused by the changes in the values of the parameters are practically reasonable. Only one of the three models is of practical use for policy analysis because it can recover the true values of the parameters and the results of sensitivity analysis are reasonable.     

The influence of crop insurance agents on coverage choices: The role of agent competition

We examine how competition among crop insurance agents affects coverage choice in the federal crop insurance program. Agents may influence producers’ insurance decisions to maximize their total compensation. We develop a theoretical model of producer–agent interaction to examine how loss potential, agent compensation mechanisms, and market competition affect the coverage level selected. Using crop insurance unit-level datasets from five states, we find evidence that agent market concentration and agents’ market share matter in the insurance coverage decisions of producers but that the economic significance of the influence is relatively small. Agent influence over coverage level, premium, and liability choice is generally positive but inconsistent across states, which may be attributable to differences in loss risk and agent compensation mechanisms.     

Factors Influencing Farmers' Crop Insurance Decisions

Farmers' decisions to purchase crop insurance and their choices among alternative products are analyzed using a two-stage estimation procedure. The influences of risk perceptions, competing risk management options, as well structural and demographic differences are evaluated. The likelihood for crop insurance usage is found to be higher for larger, older, less tenured, more highly leveraged farms, and by those with higher perceived yield risks. The marginal effects of size, age, perceived yield risk, perceived importance of risk management activities, and other structural and demographic variables are identified in terms of their influences on choices among alternative crop insurance products.     

Purchase of Catastrophe Insurance by Dutch Dairy and Arable Farmers

This article analyzed the impact of risk perception, risk attitude, and other farmer personal and farm characteristics on the actual purchase of catastrophe insurance by Dutch dairy and arable farmers. The specific catastrophe insurance types considered were hail–fire–storm insurance for buildings, disability insurance, crop insurance against hail, storm, and brown rot, and insurance against epidemic animal disease outbreaks. The results suggested that risk perception was a significant variable that influenced purchase of catastrophe insurance by dairy and arable farmers, whereas risk attitude was significant only in arable farming.     

An empirical analysis of the factors influencing farmer demand for forest insurance: Based on surveys from Lin’an County in Zhejiang Province of China

The lack of effective farmer demand is a major factor that restricts the development of China's forest insurance. To solve this problem, this study uses a Logit model to conduct an empirical analysis of relevant factors in the farmers’ demand for forest insurance, based on field survey data of Lin’an County, Zhejiang Province. The results show that the farmers’ understanding of forest insurance, the proportion of forestry revenues in the total household income, forest size, forest disaster frequency, forest insurance liability, insurance amount setup, and the farmers’ satisfaction regarding the premium subsidy policy, are the main factors that affect the farmers’ demand for forest insurance. Therefore, we propose to expand forest insurance promotion, raise the farmers’ income, rationally design insurance products, and optimize the forest premium subsidy policy to enhance the farmers’ willingness to participate in forest insurance.     

Collective Marketing Arrangements for Geographically Differentiated Agricultural Products: Welfare Impacts and Policy Implications

We examine the incentives of atomistic producers to differentiate and collectively market products. We analyze market and welfare effects of alternative producer organizations, discuss circumstances under which they will evolve, and describe implications for the ongoing debate between the EU and the United States. As fixed costs of development and marketing increase and the anticipated market size falls, it becomes essential to increase the producer organization's ability to control supply to cover the fixed costs associated with the introduction of differentiated products. Counterintuitively, stronger property right protection for producer organizations may enhance welfare even after a differentiated product has been developed.     

Transfer Efficiency Analysis of Margin‐Based Programs

AgriStability, Canada's major farm support and business risk management program, has been in place since 2007. As with most agricultural insurance programs, AgriStability creates opposing incentives where moral hazard and misallocation effects discourage production while the risk reduction effects encourage production. We investigate the relative size of these effects to determine both the degree to which production is distorted and the percentage of government transfer that remains with the producer. Our results indicate mild but differential effects across crops. We find roughly 45% of program payments remains with primary producers. These findings are of particular interest because of their World Trade Organization implications.     

Farmers' Preferences for Alternative Crop and Health Insurance Subsidy

In addition to production risks, farmers desire to balance personal risks of health care. A theoretical framework is developed for holistic health and crop insurance products that provide the opportunity to switch a portion of existing crop insurance subsidy for greater health coverage. A random utility discrete choice experiment is used to assess farmers' stated preferences for holistic insurance products. Farmers prefer higher levels of coverage and are price sensitive. A sample of farmers did not prefer the subsidy switch. However, the subsidy switch is preferred by older farmers, those with higher health care spending, and farmers who have experienced major health problems.     

The Effects of a New WTO Agreement on Canada's Chicken Market: A Differentiated Products Modeling Approach

Current World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations include proposals that would affect the trade barriers protecting Canada's chicken producers from foreign competition. This research analyzes the effects of the most recent proposals to emerge from WTO negotiations on Canada's chicken industry. We develop a partial‐equilibrium model that generates welfare effects for the Canadian chicken industry supply chain. The baseline model is adapted to represent chicken as two distinct products: white meat and dark meat. Simulation results suggest that the welfare effects of current WTO proposals would be small, providing that chicken receives the sensitive products designation. Liberalization leads to higher total welfare in the chicken industry, which is accounted for by consumer welfare that increases by a larger amount than producer welfare decreases. The results are very sensitive to the disaggregation of chicken as two products; a finding that should inform future research.