Nicholas D. Paulson, Joshua D. Woodard and Bruce Babcock
The purpose of this paper is to investigate changes proposed in 2012 to commodity programs for the new Farm Bill. Both the Senate and House Agriculture Committee versions of the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate changes proposed in 2012 to commodity programs for the new Farm Bill. Both the Senate and House Agriculture Committee versions of the new Farm Bill eliminate current commodity programs including direct payments, create new revenue‐based commodity program options designed to cover “shallow” revenue losses, and also introduce supplemental crop insurance coverage for shallow revenue losses.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper documents the payment functions for the new revenue programs proposed in both the Senate and House Ag Committee Farm Bills, and also estimates expected payments for each using a model based on historical county yield data, farmer‐level risk rates from RMA, and commodity price levels from the March 2012 CBO baseline projections.
Findings
The authors find significant variation in expected per acre payment across programs, crops, and regions. In general, the Senate's bill would be expected to be preferred over the House's bill for corn and soybean producers, particularly those in the Midwest. Also, the RLC program in the House's Bill typically would be projected to pay much less than the Senate's SCO or ARC programs for most producers in the Midwest.
Originality/value
This study develops an extensive nationwide model of county and farm yield and price risks for the five major US crops and employs the model to evaluate expected payment rates and the distribution of payments under the House and Senate Farm Bill proposals. These analyses are important for program evaluation and should be of great interest to producers and policymakers.
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The purpose of this paper is to examine the market impacts of US biofuels and biofuel policies.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the market impacts of US biofuels and biofuel policies.
Design/methodology/approach
Two methods of analysis are employed. The first method looks back in time and estimates what US crop prices would have been during the 2005 to 2009 marketing years under two scenarios. The second method of analysis is forward looking and examines the market impacts of the blender tax credit and mandate on the distribution of prices in the 2011 calendar and marketing year.
Findings
The results developed in the previous two sections show that US ethanol policies modestly increased maize prices from 2006 to 2009 and that market impacts of the policies will be larger under tighter market conditions.
Practical implications
More flexible US biofuel policy including removing the blenders tax credit, which does not help US biofuel industry as long as the mandates are in place, and relaxing blending mandates when feedstock supplies are low.
Originality/value
This report makes three contributions to understanding the extent to which US biofuel policies contribute to higher agricultural and food prices. First, estimates of the impact of US ethanol policies on crop and food prices reveal that the impacts of the subsidies were quite modest. The second contribution is to provide estimates of the impact on agricultural commodity prices and food prices from market‐driven expansion of ethanol. The final contribution of this report is improved insight into how current US biofuel policies are expected to affect crop prices in the near future.
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Nicholas D. Paulson, Bruce Babcock and Jonathan Coppess
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the growth and rising costs association with the Federal Crop Insurance program in the USA, justifications for public support, and recent…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the growth and rising costs association with the Federal Crop Insurance program in the USA, justifications for public support, and recent reforms that have been implemented or proposed to reduce program costs. It also analyzes a specific policy to reduce premium assistance spending.
Design/methodology/approach
Data from the Risk Management Agency are used to illustrate historical trends in crop insurance program costs and to analyze the impacts of imposing a per acre cap on premium assistance.
Findings
Imposing a per acre cap on premium assistance could achieve significant savings. A $20 per acre cap is estimated to reduce premium subsidy expenditures by more than 40 percent. However, the impact of such a policy would be most severe on crops currently receiving the largest subsidies per acre, which happen to be some of the largest program crops in the USA.
Originality/value
This paper adds to the literature analyzing potential reform in crop insurance industry. The subsidy cap considered has been proposed and considered by policy makers, and this paper provides estimates for its potential savings.
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Chester Whitney Wright (1879–1966) received his A.B. in 1901, A.M. in 1902 and Ph.D. in 1906, all from Harvard University. After teaching at Cornell University during 1906–1907…
Abstract
Chester Whitney Wright (1879–1966) received his A.B. in 1901, A.M. in 1902 and Ph.D. in 1906, all from Harvard University. After teaching at Cornell University during 1906–1907, he taught at the University of Chicago from 1907 to 1944. Wright was the author of Economic History of the United States (1941, 1949); editor of Economic Problems of War and Its Aftermath (1942), to which he contributed a chapter on economic lessons from previous wars, and other chapters were authored by John U. Nef (war and the early industrial revolution) and by Frank H. Knight (the war and the crisis of individualism); and co-editor of Materials for the Study of Elementary Economics (1913). Wright’s Wool-Growing and the Tariff received the David Ames Wells Prize for 1907–1908, and was volume 5 in the Harvard Economic Studies. I am indebted to Holly Flynn for assistance in preparing Wright’s biography and in tracking down incomplete references; to Marianne Johnson in preparing many tables and charts; and to F. Taylor Ostrander, as usual, for help in transcribing and proofreading.
Nicholas D. Paulson, Gary D. Schnitkey and Bruce J. Sherrick
This study seeks to evaluate the impacts of land rental arrangements on crop insurance and grain marketing decisions.
Abstract
Purpose
This study seeks to evaluate the impacts of land rental arrangements on crop insurance and grain marketing decisions.
Design/methodology/approach
The analysis is conducted in an Illinois corn‐soybean setting in which optimal marketing and crop insurance decisions are estimated for a risk‐averse producer under typical cash rent and share rent agreements using numerical simulation methods.
Findings
Results indicate that the availability of crop insurance impacts the intensity of use of put options under both cash and share rent arrangements. Similar to previous work in this area, revenue insurance is found to cause a substitution away from marketing using put options, while yield insurance is complementary to price risk management alternatives. However, while insurance and marketing play a role under both types of land tenure arrangements, shifting from a cash rent to a share rent agreement provides a relatively greater degree of risk reduction.
Practical implications
The results suggest that additional research is needed to explain trends in land rental contracts. Crop insurance and other federal programs may provide incentives to switch from share leases to cash rent arrangements. Changes to the design of these programs could facilitate risk management for producers more efficiently.
Originality/value
The unique contribution of this study is the comparison of insurance and marketing decisions under both cash rent and share rent agreements for crop land.
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Gary D. Schnitkey, Bruce J. Sherrick and Scott H. Irwin
This study evaluates the impacts on gross revenue distributions of the use of alternative crop insurance products across different coverage levels and across locations with…
Abstract
This study evaluates the impacts on gross revenue distributions of the use of alternative crop insurance products across different coverage levels and across locations with differing yield risks. Results are presented in terms of net costs, values‐at‐risk, and certainty equivalent returns associated with five types of multi‐peril crop insurance across different coverage levels. Findings show that the group policies often result in average payments exceeding their premium costs. Individual revenue products reduce risk in the tails more than group policies, but result in greater reductions in mean revenues. Rankings based on certainty equivalent returns and low frequency VaRs generally favor revenue products. As expected, crop insurance is associated with greater relative risk reduction in locations with greater underlying yield variability.
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The Archers storyline of domestic abuse has raised awareness of the phenomenon of coercive controlling behaviours and marital rape. This chapter provides some context for the…
Abstract
The Archers storyline of domestic abuse has raised awareness of the phenomenon of coercive controlling behaviours and marital rape. This chapter provides some context for the occurrence of partner sexual violence and focuses on profiling the antecedents of the perpetrator. Personal and family histories identify potential risk factors and include attachment problems, childhood exposure to family violence and personality disorder. These provide markers for future violating behaviours in intimate relationships. The absence of preventative factors such as a positive mentoring adult and supportive school environment increases the likelihood of subsequent offending. Predictions about cessation, continuation and escalation of violence will also be discussed.
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Zhangliang Chen, Sandy Dall'Erba and Bruce J. Sherrick
Federal crop insurance programs are the primary risk management programs of the US farm programs. Currently, these programs have been criticized for being disproportionally in…
Abstract
Purpose
Federal crop insurance programs are the primary risk management programs of the US farm programs. Currently, these programs have been criticized for being disproportionally in favor of the riskier areas. Despite previous researchers having widely speculated its existence, a formal study of the scale, spatial pattern and fiscal impacts of such misrating phenomenon is still missing in the literature.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper first purposes an empirically testable definition of misrating, and then detects the scale of the misrating phenomenon by using over two million actuarial records collected by United States Department of Agriculture (USDA's) risk management agency since 1989. Furthermore, multiple spatial statistics methods have been adopted to study the spatial patterns of the misrating statuses. Finally, the paper builds a simple theoretical model to study the potential fiscal impacts of any policy attempts to mitigate the misrating issue.
Findings
The result reveals that roughly 40% of the counties display some degree of misrating. Furthermore, the distribution of misrating displays a significant pattern of positive global spatial autocorrelation, which reflects the existence of regional clusters of premium rate mispricing. Last but not least, the paper concludes that whether an attempt toward fair rating decreases the total program outlay or not relies on the demand elasticity of crop insurance in both overrated and underrated regions.
Originality/value
This paper offers the first attempt to quantify the scale, identify the spatial pattern and evaluate the fiscal impact of the premium misrating in federal crop insurance programs.
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Obafemi Olekanma, Christian Harrison, Adebukola E. Oyewunmi and Oluwatomi Adedeji
This empirical study aims to explore how actors in specific human resource practices (HRPs) such as line managers (LMs) impact employee productivity measures in the context of…
Abstract
Purpose
This empirical study aims to explore how actors in specific human resource practices (HRPs) such as line managers (LMs) impact employee productivity measures in the context of financial institutions (FI) banks.
Design/methodology/approach
This cross-country study adopted a qualitative methodology. It employed semi-structured interviews to collect data from purposefully selected 12 business facing directors (BFDs) working in the top 10 banks in Nigeria and the UK. The data collected were analysed with the help of the trans-positional cognition approach (TPCA) phenomenological method.
Findings
The findings of a TPCA analytical process imply that in the UK and Nigeria’s FIs, the BFDs line managers’ human resources practices (LMHRPs) resulted in a highly regulated workplace, knowledge gap, service operations challenges and subjective quantitatively driven key performance indicators, considered service productivity paradoxical elements. Although the practices in the UK and Nigerian FIs had similar labels, their aggregates were underpinned by different contextual issues.
Practical implications
To support LMs in better understanding and managing FIs BFDs productivity measures and outcomes, we propose the Managerial Employee Productivity Operational Definition framework as part of their toolkit. This study will be helpful for banking sectors, their regulators, policymakers, other FIs’ industry stakeholders and future researchers in the field.
Originality/value
Within the context of the UK and Nigeria’s FIs, this study is the first attempt to understand how LMHRPs impact BFDs productivity in this manner. It confirms that LMHRPs result in service productivity paradoxical elements with perceived or lost productivity implications.