Acreage Abandonment, Moral Hazard and Crop Insurance

Empirical evidence for the existence of moral hazard in the U.S. crop insurance program has been inconclusive. Here we use a nested-dynamic programming framework to estimate an intra-seasonal dynamic model that explicitly incorporates a farmer's crop abandonment decision. The estimation is implemented for selected Texas counties where actuarial performances of the crop insurance program are poor and high incidences of acreage abandonment are frequently observed.Farm Management,