Barnett, Barry J.

December, 2011

The SURE Program and Its Interaction with Other Federal Farm Programs

By: Ubilava, David; Barnett, Barry J.; Coble, Keith H.; Harri, Ardian
We investigate potential effects of the Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments (SURE) program introduced in the 2008 Farm Bill. Results suggest little impact on optimal crop insurance purchase decisions, though the SURE program does seem to provide an incentive for mid-level insurance coverage. For producers in the price counter-cyclical payment (PCCP) program, SURE payments are actually higher (lower) when commodity prices are high (low). This is not the case for producers in the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program.
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August, 2006

Designing Catastrophe Bonds to Securitize Systemic Risks in Agriculture: The Case of Georgia Cotton

By: Vedenov, Dmitry V.; Epperson, James E.; Barnett, Barry J.
This article makes an initial attempt to design catastrophe (CAT) bond products for agriculture and examines the potential of these instruments as mechanisms for transferring agricultural risks from insurance companies to investors/speculators in the global capital market. The case of Georgia cotton is considered as a specific example. The CAT bond contracts are based on percentage deviations of realized state average yields relative to the long-run average. The contracts are priced using historical state-level cotton yield data. The principal finding of the study is that the proposed CAT bonds demonstrate potential as risk transfer mechanisms for crop insurance companies.
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August, 2005

Is Area Yield Insurance Competitive with Farm Yield Insurance?

By: Barnett, Barry J.; Black, J. Roy; Hu, Yingyao; Skees, Jerry R.
This article compares risk reduction from MPCI and GRP crop insurance contracts. The analysis extends and improves on the existing area-yield insurance literature in four important respects. First, the geographical scope greatly exceeds that of previous work. Second, unlike previous efforts, the area is not assumed to consist only of those farms included in the analysis. Third, the analysis is based on the actual GRP indemnity function rather than the area-yield indemnity function commonly used in the literature. Fourth, the analysis avoids the questionable assumption that GRP scale can be optimized at the individual farm level. Even with a number of conservative assumptions favoring MPCI relative to GRP, results indicate that at least for some crops and regions GRP is aviable alternative to MPCI.
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December, 2004

Efficiency of Weather Derivatives as Primary Crop Insurance Instruments

By: Vedenov, Dmitry V.; Barnett, Barry J.
This study analyzes efficiency of weather derivatives as primary insurance instruments for six crop reporting districts that are among the largest producers of corn, cotton, and soybeans in the United States. Specific weather derivatives are constructed for each crop/district combination based on analysis of several econometric models. The performance of the designed weather derivatives is then analyzed both in- and out-of-sample. The primary findings suggest that the optimal structure of weather derivatives varies widely across crops and regions, as does the risk-reducing performance of the optimally designed weather derivatives. Further, optimal weather derivatives required rather complicated combinations of weather variables to achieve reasonable fits between weather and yield.
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July, 2001

DEVELOPING AND PRICING PRECIPITATION INSURANCE

By: Martin, Steven W.; Barnett, Barry J.; Coble, Keith H.
Production agriculture and agribusiness are exposed to many weather-related risks. Recent years have seen the emergence of an increased interest in weather-based derivatives as mechanisms for sharing risks due to weather phenomena. In this study, a unique precipitation derivative is proposed that allows the purchaser to specify the parameters of the idemnity function. Pricing methods are presented in the context of a cotton harvest example from Mississippi. Our findings show a potential for weather derivatives to serve niche markets within U.S. agriculture.
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