The failure of the development of commercially viable traditional crop insurance products and innovations in financial markers has fed a renewed interest in the search for alternatives to help producers in developing countries manage their risk exposure. Salient among these is the proposal of...

Index insurance has been promoted as a cost-effective risk management alternative for agricultural producers in developing countries. In this paper, we ask whether spatially separated weather variables commonly used in index insurance design, such as rainfall at different weather stations within...

The influence of climate variability on agricultural production and financial risks faced by an individual or an institution has been the center of the public discussion in the recent years. The changing weather patterns and environmental conditions could cause substantial unpredicted economic...

Paper removed/under major revisions Sept. 25, 2014.

In this paper we estimate the effects of an imperfect insurance coverage on subjective well-being of a poor, rural population, by exploring whether insurance in force improves subjective well-being and whether insurance that lapsed but did not pay out leads to ex post buyer’s remorse....

In the US forestry industry, wildre has always been one of the leading causes of damage. This topic is of growing interest as wildre has caused huge losses in recent years. Among all causes, lightning has always been the leading hazard. Unlike human related wildres for which timber owners may be...

We present a novel way to understand the low uptake of index insurance using the interlinked concepts of ambiguity and compound-lottery aversion. Noting that the presence of basis risk makes index insurance a compound lottery, we derive an expression of the willingness to pay (WTP) to eliminate...