In many low-income countries, agriculture is mostly rainfed and crop yield highly depends on climatic factors. Furthermore, farmers have little access to traditional crop insurance, which suffers from high information asymmetry and transaction costs. Insurances based on meteorological indices could fill this gap since they do not face such drawbacks. However full-scale implementation has been s...

This paper focuses on the US Billion-dollar Weather/Climate Disaster report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center. The current methodology for the production of this loss dataset is described, highlighting its strengths and limitations including sources of uncertainty and bias. The Insurance Services Office/Property Claims Service, the US Federal...

Theoretically, weather-index insurance is an effective risk reduction option for small-scale farmers in low income countries. Renewed policy and donor emphasis on bridging gender gaps in development also emphasizes the potential social safety net benefits that weather-index insurance could bring to women farmers who are disproportionately vulnerable to climate change risk and have low adaptive ...

A Bayesian Updating Approach to Crop Insurance Ratemaking by Stephen Milton Stohs Doctor of Philosophy in Agricultural and Resource Economics University of California, Berkeley Professor Peter Berck, Chair The U.S. government operates the multiple peril crop insurance (MPCI) program to provide farmers with comprehensive protection against yield risk due to weather-related causes of loss and cer...

Why have insurance markets for many important risks failed to develop? Economic theory suggests this is most likely due to asymmetric information problems, but their presence is hard to identify empirically. In this paper I provide empirical estimates of information asymmetries in the insurance for crops, a market that has failed to develop for the most important types of natural hazards to cro...