Supported Employment and Other Work Programs in Developmental Disabilities

Here\u27s the first book of its kind to provide a comprehensive overview of the full range of occupational therapy interventions for work-related services. The authors build a foundation of knowledge based on the development of the worker role, the meaning and function of work in modern day society, and cultural interpretations of work. They then focus on specialized areas of occupational therapy assessment and intervention, including psychosocial and physical assessment and preventative programming.https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hpd_ot_faculty_books/1013/thumbnail.jp

Weather Index Insurance and Climate Change: Opportunities and Challenges in Lower Income Countries

Weather index insurance underwrites a weather risk, typically highly correlated with agricultural production losses, as a proxy for economic loss and is gaining popularity in lower income countries. This instrument, although subject to basis risk and high start-up costs, should reduce costs over traditional agricultural insurance. Multilateral institutions have suggested that weather index insurance could enhance the ability of stakeholders in lower income countries to adapt to climate change. While weather index insurance could have several benefits in this context (e.g. providing a safety net to vulnerable households and price signals regarding the weather risk), climate change impacts increase the price of insurance due to increasing weather risk. Uncertainty about the extent of regional impacts compounds pricing difficulties. Policy recommendations for insurance market development include funding risk assessments, start-up costs and the extreme layer of risk. General premium subsidies are cautioned against as they may actually slow household adaptation. The Geneva Papers (2009) 34, 401–424. doi:10.1057/gpp.2009.11

Using copulas for rating weather index insurance contracts

<p>This study develops a methodology for a copula-based weather index insurance design. Because the copula approach is better suited for modeling tail dependence than the standard linear correlation approach, its use may increase the effectiveness of weather insurance contracts designed to provide protection against extreme weather events. In our study, we employ three selected Archimedean copulas to capture the left-tail dependence in the joint distribution of the farm yield and a specific weather index. A hierarchical Bayesian model is applied to obtain consistent estimates of tail dependence using relatively short time series. Our empirical results for 47 large grain-producing farms from Kazakhstan indicate that, given the choice of an appropriate weather index to signal catastrophic events, such as a severe drought, copula-based weather insurance contracts may provide significantly higher risk reductions than regression-based indemnification schemes.</p