Rating Crop Insurance Contracts with Nonparametric Bayesian Model Averaging
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abstract
The United States is not alone; subsidized crop insurance has and continues to be the cornerstone of domestic agricultural policy in most developed countries, including Canada, Spain, Italy, Japan, and France (Smith and Glauber, 2012). [...]crop insurance programs have been integral to rural economic growth in many developing countries, including Brazil, China, India, Malaysia, Philippines, and countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Roberts, 2005; Herbold, 2010). Because crop insurance is the cornerstone of domestic agricultural policy in almost all developed countries and vast sums of public monies are used to subsidize crop insurance premiums, there exists a significant amount of literature on estimating yield densities and premium rates. [...]the largest efficiency gains with BMA are in small samples, where there is relatively little information in the individual sample. [...]corn and soybean tend to make greater use of the spatially extraneous data, suggesting that their densities are more homogeneous across space than the densities of winter wheat and cotton.