Almost universally, implementers of index insurance for low income households have chosen to embed insurance with other interventions designed to improve productivity, with the insurance used almost entirely to make the other interventions possible. A common example is to use the insurance to...

Rankings of different risk management portfolios including Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE), traditional government payment programs, crop insurance and hedging in futures; and optimal choices of insurance coverage levels and hedge ratios are evaluated for a representative central Indiana...

The "financialization" of commodity markets have become a concern for policy makers and market participants. What was once a market for the hedging of holding physical commodities has expanded to become a market for the diversification of financial assets. When financial assets diversification...

Corn markets are important for many industries. These include the seed, fertilizer, meat production/processing and agricultural machinery sectors, all of which are highly concentrated. Oligopoly theory suggests that corn input and field equipment suppliers likely benefit from policies that...

This paper assesses the cost efficiency of indicator-based targeting. Using household survey data from Malawi, we examine whether an indicator-based targeting of the poor is more target- and cost-efficient than the currently used mechanisms for targeting agricultural subsidy programs in the...

Forthcoming in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

We report results of an analysis of the attribution of relative responsibility across the stages of the food chain for ensuring food safety. Specifically, we identify perceptions of the share of the overall responsibility that each stage in the food chain has to ensure that the meat people cook...

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/06/10.