Valuing Agricultural Insurance

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for estimating a farmer's stochastic discount factor that is independent of his or her risk preferences, and shows that that stochastic discount factor is appropriate for calculating a farmer's willingness to pay for a crop insurance product. An empirical example illustrates how production and price data might be combined with returns data to permit econometric estimation of the stochastic discount factor, and the implications of those illustrative results are briefly discussed. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.