IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/aaea09/49569.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Adversity and the Propensity to Fail: The Impact of Disaster Payments and Multiple Peril Crop Insurance on U.S. Farm Exit Rates

Author

Listed:
  • Kirwan, Barrett E.

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of government-provided crop insurance on farm failure rates. By exploiting random variation in weather and the Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act of 1994, which mandated crop insurance coverage for the first time, I employ two natural experiments that identify the causal effect of disaster relief on farm failure rates. I examine the survival smoothing contribution of crop insurance by looking at the relative effect of disaster relief across two regimes, pre- and post-1994. Prior to 1994 ad hoc, ex post disaster payments were the primary form of disaster relief. Shortly after the 1994 Act virtually all disaster relief came through crop insurance indemnities. I find that disaster relief in the form of ad hoc disaster payments slightly reduces the average farm failure rate, while average farm failure rates increase under the crop insurance regime. The relative effect suggests that farm failure rates increase by 1.7 percentage points (about 30-percent) under the crop insurance regime. Excessively generous ad hoc disaster payments and moral hazard provide possible explanations for these findings. These findings suggest that government-provided crop insurance plays an important role in farmer risk management.

Suggested Citation

  • Kirwan, Barrett E., 2009. "Adversity and the Propensity to Fail: The Impact of Disaster Payments and Multiple Peril Crop Insurance on U.S. Farm Exit Rates," 2009 Annual Meeting, July 26-28, 2009, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 49569, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
  • Handle: RePEc:ags:aaea09:49569
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.49569
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/49569/files/Kirwan%20AAEA%20Disaster.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.49569?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chakir, Raja & Hardelin, Julien, 2011. "Hail Insurance and Pesticide use in French agriculture: an empirical analysis of multiple risks management," 2011 International Congress, August 30-September 2, 2011, Zurich, Switzerland 114312, European Association of Agricultural Economists.
    2. Chakir, Raja & Hardelin, Julien, 2014. "Crop Insurance and pesticide use in French agriculture: an empirical analysis," Review of Agricultural and Environmental Studies - Revue d'Etudes en Agriculture et Environnement (RAEStud), Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), vol. 95(1).
    3. Raja Chakir & Julien Hardelin, 2010. "Crop Insurance and Pesticides in French agriculture: an empirical analysis of multiple risks management," Working Papers 2010/04, INRA, Economie Publique.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Agricultural Finance; Farm Management; Risk and Uncertainty;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:aaea09:49569. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aaeaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.