Given the procedures to be followed in this research, time series of price and yield realizations that are representative of what farmers might face in future years are needed to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed CISA. Reliable parametric estimates of future price and yield distributions are required to generate those realizations and sufficiently long historical price and yield time series are necessary in order to estimate those distributions. While long time series are available for most major commodity prices, multi-decade farm-level yield records are not as common. Fortunately, the University of Illinois Endowment Farms project has been collecting such records from 26 different “representative” corn producers during the last 50 years. Therefore, the “test-of-concept” analyses presented in this article are conducted for the specific case of corn producers in the State of Illinois.
Appendix II to article published in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy