RECENT TRENDS AFFECTING FARM AND RURAL BUSINESS FINANCE

Agricultural Finance,

Farmers' Subjective Yield Distributions: Calibration and Implications for Crop Insurance Valuation

This paper examines the role of overconfidence in explaining farmer crop insurance purchasing decisions. The authors hypothesize that overconfidence could influence the participation decision and test this hypothesis. The preliminary results indicate that farmers are overconfident; however, the relationship between overconfidence and the insurance use remains uncertain.Risk and Uncertainty,

Measuring the Credit Risk of AgriBank Loans under the New Basel Capital Accord: A Logit Regression Approach

Financial Economics, Q21, G21,

INCOME AND CAPITALIZATION RATE RISK IN AGRICULTURAL REAL ESTATE MARKETS

Farmland Prices, Farmland Returns, Capitalization Rates, Risk, Asset Bubbles, Land Economics/Use, Q14,

Valuation and Efficient Allocation of GSM Export Credit Guarantees

Estimates of country-level loan default distributions are developed and used in a loan guarantee model to value the contingent liability of USDA's General Sales Manager (GSM) export credit guarantee portfolio. The results quantify the relationship between increasing guarantee coverage and the resulting actuarial liability to the government. Optimal coverage levels and optimal country-level allocations are determined for given policy objectives and coverage totals. Findings reveal that the government's allocation of country guarantees is risk-inefficient; and guidance is provided for making risk-efficient allocations for any program size.contingent liability, export credit, GSM, loan guarantee valuation, risk efficiency, Agricultural Finance,

THE TERM STRUCTURE OF IMPLIED FORWARD VOLATILITY: RECOVERY AND INFORMATIONAL CONTENT IN THE CORN OPTIONS MARKET

Options with different maturities can be used to generate volatility estimates for non-overlapping future time intervals. This paper develops the term structure of volatility implied by corn futures options, and evaluates the informational content of the implied forward volatility as a predictor of subsequent realized volatility. Using data from 1987-2001 and employing a flexible method to obtain the implied forward volatilities, two types of information are examined: 1) the market's estimate of future realized volatility for the nearby interval of the term structure and, 2) the market's expectation of the direction and magnitude of change of future realized volatility over time. In contrast to previous research, the results indicate that the implied forward volatilities anticipate the realized volatilities provide unbiased forecasts and capture a larger portion of the systematic variability in the realized volatilities than forecasts based on historical volatilities. Using information on the direction and magnitude of change in volatility over time, we find that the early-year options forecast volatility about as well as the three-year moving average and better than the naive forecast, while later-year options and alternative forecasts are less able to predict the direction and magnitude of changing volatility. During this later-year period, the implied forward volatilities tend to over-predict the magnitude of actual volatility. Overall, we find that the term structure of volatility implied by corn futures options contains information on future realized volatility.corn options, implied forward volatility, informational content, term structure, Marketing,

Actuarial Impacts of Loss Cost Ratio Ratemaking in U.S. Crop Insurance Programs

This study examines the actuarial implications of the loss cost ratio (LCR) ratemaking methodology employed by the Risk Management Agency as a component of base rates for U.S. crop insurance programs, and identifies specific conditions required for the LCR methodology to result in unbiased rates when liabilities trend. Specifically, constant relative yield risk resulting in growing absolute variance through time and other restrictive requirements are required for the LCR to result in unbiased rates. These requirements are tested against a large farm-level data set for Illinois corn. Our findings indicate that the conditions required for appropriate use of the LCR methodology are violated for this high premium volume market, resulting in large implied rate biases. The process does not correct itself through time with the addition of longer rating periods as sometimes claimed. A simple correction function is suggested and demonstrated.actuarially fair, crop insurance, insurance rating, loss cost ratio, risk growth, Risk Management Agency, yield trends, Crop Production/Industries, Risk and Uncertainty,

Evaluating Yield Models for Crop Insurance Rating

Generated crop insurance rates depend critically on the distributional assumptions of the underlying crop yield loss model. Using farm level corn yield data from 1972-2008, we revisit the problem of examining in-sample goodness-of-fit measures across a set of flexible parametric, semi-parametric, and non-parametric distributions. Simulations are also conducted to investigate the out-of-sample efficiency properties of several competing distributions. The results indicate that more parameterized distributional forms fit the data better in-sample due to the fact that they have more parameters, but are generally less efficient out-of-sample–and in some cases more biased–than more parsimonious forms which also fit the data adequately, such as the Weibull. The results highlight the relative advantages of alternative distributions in terms of the bias-efficiency tradeoff in both in- and out-of-sample frameworks.Yield distributions, Crop Insurance, Weibull Distribution, Beta Distribution, Mixture Distribution, Out-of-Sample Efficiency, Goodness-of-Fit, Insurance Rating Efficiency, Farm Management, Financial Economics, Land Economics/Use,

THE IMPACT OF SWINE PRODUCTION ON LAND VALUES IN ILLINOIS

Based on a spatiotemporal hedonic farmland price model and county-level data in Illinois from 1979 to 1999, we examined the impact of swine production on farmland values. Our results show that, in addition to the conventional determinants of farmland values, an increase in swine production intensity has a negative relationship with farmland values while an increase in swine operation scale had a positive association with farmland values at the county level in Illinois. We also estimate the impact of changes in the Illinois swine industry over the period 1980-1999 on farmland values at the state level and find that changes in swine inventory and scale of swine operations have led to changes in farmland prices from $-10.56 to$62.96 per acre. In general, the changes in Illinois swine industry increase farmland values in Illinois.Land Economics/Use,