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Revision with unchanged content. Systemic risk, in regard to agricultural production, refers to the spatial depen dence of crop yields stemming from correlated weather, soil patterns, and other geographically related factors. Systemic risk has been named as a contributing factor to the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation´s (FCIC) poor actuarial performance. To date, little research has explored the spatial depen dence structure of crop yields. This book explores three aspects of the spatial dependence structure of yields; the cross-crop spatial correlation structure, the rate of crop yield spatial correlation decay, and, using the copula metho dology, the characteristics of the bivariate distributions that define the spatial relationship of crop yields. This book is addressed to professionals research ing in the area of crop insurance.

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Assistant Professor of Economics at Elon University. She holds a M.E. and a Ph.D. in economics from North Carolina State University. Her research interests are econometrics and statistical forecasting as well as economic and business applications of nonparametric, spatial, and multivariate statistics.

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