Area based insurance contracts have long been offered to crop producers as an option for risk management. However, the take-up rate for such programs remains low. In this paper, utilizing RMA unit-level corn yield data and NASS county-level corn yield data, we investigate roles of systemic risk and premiums subsidies in producers' choices between area and individual insurance contracts. We find that, on average, systemic risk explains slightly more than one third of total unit yield variability. Systemic risk is high in the Southern and Western Corn Belts and its geographic distribution matches well the geographic distribution of county yield variance. Systemic risk increases with both beneficial and stressful heat accumulations, frequency of drought, and land quality. We also study the lower bound on subsidy rate for area insurance when normalized by that for individual insurance such that the expected net returns to area yield insurance equals the expected net return of individual yield insurance. We find that this lower bound is negatively correlated with systemic risk. Producers in high systemic risk counties will require fewer subsidies to possibly choose area insurance over individual insurance. Moreover, we find that were transfer maximization a producer's only concern then the current area subsidy rate might be a major deterrent for producers to choose low coverage level area insurance. Raising the area insurance subsidy rate might be a feasible option to induce more area insurance demand because the transfer-equalizing area insurance subsidy rate exceeds 100% for only a small fraction of producers.

The publicly subsidized Federal Crop Insurance Program has expanded rapidly in recent decades in the United States. With the reform in the 2014 Farm Bill, the Federal Crop Insurance Program has become the most important component of U.S. farm policies. The primary goal of the program is to provide risk protections for farmers. However, there is sporadic evidence of welfare costs associated with the program due to moral hazard, adverse selection, deadweight loss from the subsidy transfer and transaction costs. To provide a complete and systematic assessment, it requires a thorough theoretical understandings and credible empirical measurement of the welfare effect of the Federal Crop Insurance Program. We apply the sufficient statistics approach to consolidate various welfare effects of crop insurance and to provide quantitative evidence for the welfare analysis. We analyze a model in a setting where information asymmetry and systemic risk form an adverse environment for private sectors to provide insurance and therefore create a need for government intervention. From the model, we derive the condition for optimal contract and identify key parameters that affect the welfare effects of risk protection, information asymmetry, and premium subsidy. The results not only provide policy implications and but also suggest the key parameters needed for measuring the welfare effect of publically provided crop insurance programs empirically. To measure the welfare effect of the Federal Crop Insurance Program, we need to understand how the program affects the distribution of revenue. To this end, a moment-based approach is used to estimate the reduced-form equations of the first two moments of revenue distributions using farm-level Agricultural Census data from the U.S. Heartland region for 2002, 2007 and 2012. The control function approach is applied to control for the endogeneity problem caused by the self-selection of insurance coverage, under the assumption that selection into different coverage level is based on a set of observed covariates and time-invariant factors. Our results show that increase in coverage level is associated with a lower mean and higher variability of farm revenue per acre. The impacts of insurance coverage on the revenue distribution, as a reduced-form representation of the moral hazard, suggest a welfare loss. Other key parameters affecting marginal welfare effects of the Federal Crop Insurance Program include risk attitude parameters, insurance demand elasticity with respect to price, the impacts of insurance coverage on the production outcomes, marginal welfare cost of deadweight loss, and loading factors. We collect the information on the range of the values of these parameters from existing literatures. The Bootstrap method is applied to estimate marginal welfare effects discussed in the conceptual model. The results suggest that under the current policy setting, the net marginal welfare effects of coverage level and subsidy rate are both negative, suggesting that both the coverage level and the subsidy rate are greater than their optimal level. However, from farmers’ perspectives, the current risk protection level is appropriate.

Governments in developing countries have been increasingly involved in the support of agricultural (crop and livestock) insurance programs in recent years. In their attempts to design and implement agricultural insurance, they have sought technical and financial assistance from the international community and particularly from the World Bank. One of the recurrent requests from governments regards international experience with agricultural insurance, not only in developed countries, where in some cases agricultural insurance has been offered for more than a century, but also in middleand low-income countries. Governments are particularly interested in the technical, operational, financial, and institutional aspects of public support to agricultural insurance. 'Government Support to Agricultural Insurance' informs public and private decision makers involved in agricultural insurance about recent developments, with a particular focus on middle- and low-income countries. It presents an updated picture of the spectrum of institutional frameworks and experiences with agricultural insurance, ranging from countries in which the public sector provides no support to those in which governments heavily subsidize agricultural insurance. This analysis is based on a survey conducted by the World Bank s agricultural insurance team in 2008 in 65 developed and developing countries. Drawing on the survey results, the book identifies some key roles governments can play to support the development of sustainable, affordable, and cost-effective agricultural insurance programs.

This guide is intended to help extension workers better understand the concept of risk, the situation where risk occurs and management strategies that can be used to reduce, or at least soften, its effect. It is hoped that the guide will be useful in assisting extension workers to provide farmers with advice on the kind of risk management strategies that they can employ to deal with risk in their day-to-day operations. In this way extension workers can help farmers recognize and understand the risks that they are likely to face and assist them in making better farm management decisions that reduce the negative effect of the risks encountered in farming.

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Using economic models and empirical analysis, this volume examines a wide range of agricultural and biofuel policy issues and their effects on American agricultural and related agrarian insurance markets. Beginning with a look at the distribution of funds by insurance programs—created to support farmers but often benefiting crop processors instead—the book then examines the demand for biofuel and the effects of biofuel policies on agricultural price uncertainty. Also discussed are genetically engineered crops, which are assuming an increasingly important role in arbitrating tensions between energy production, environmental protection, and the global food supply. Other contributions discuss the major effects of genetic engineering on worldwide food markets. By addressing some of the most challenging topics at the intersection of agriculture and biotechnology, this volume informs crucial debates.