Typescript. / Digitized by Kansas State University Libraries

Thesis (M.S.)--Wisconsin. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 250-277).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, December 2008. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Apr. 29, 2010). "School of Economic Sciences." Includes bibliographical references.

The Federal Crop Insurance program is a management tool which is available to U.S. farmers and which is designed to protect them against low yields arising from natural disasters. Since the program is optional in nature, its provisions cannot be detrimental to a rationally behaving farmer. This work analyzes but goes beyond the private benefits of the Federal Crop Insurance program to farmers and represents a qualitative and quantitative attempt at investigating the implications of the availability of the program on risk-taking behavior and social welfare. Analytically, a simple model of the allocation of land among two crops (one safe and the other risky in the yield) is used along with the behavioral hypothesis of expected utility maximization. It is indicated that a subsidized program will, in general, induce greater risk-taking behavior. The impact of the program on crop-mix is, however, ambiguous when the expected insurance indemnities fall short of the premium paid. Given insurance availability, however, it is demonstrated that, under some reasonable assumptions about farmers' risk preferences, a premium subsidy will tend to induce greater risk taking. A major portion of the empirical work, which is undertaken within an expected value of income-variance of income framework, relates to the estimation of farmers' risk preferences on the basis of actual crop-mix data for individual farms in Arizona and estimated subjective distributions about prices, yields and costs of production. The estimation of the subjective distribution of prices is based on futures as well as cash prices. Given the risk aversion coefficient estimates for a sample of thirteen farmers, predicted crop-mixes are then obtained under the cases of insurance availability and no insurance. Results of the empirical study suggest that the Federal Crop Insurance program (in its pre-1980 version at least) does not have a significant impact on crop-mix. Finally, using the Arrow-Lind criterion of welfare assessment under uncertainty, the study casts doubt on the social desirability of the Federal Crop Insurance program.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-217).

This study utilizes farm yield data to generate the relationship between farm and county yields, and farm and crop reporting district (CRD) yields by using seemingly unrelated regression (SUR). The relationships are used to examine whether CRD level insurance is a viable alternative for county level Group Risk Plan (GRP) or Group Risk Insurance Protection (GRIP) by generating the certainty equivalent for each producer under different insurance scenarios, which includes no insurance, county level insurance and CRD level insurance under different scales and risk aversion coefficient levels. The analysis is conducted for Iowa CRD 10, Ohio CRD 10, Georgia CRD 70, Mississippi CRD 40, and Kansas CRD 30. This study also analyzes how well deep loss and shallow loss programs perform in different production regions by looking at the marginal certainty equivalent effects.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 244-249).