Corn plants lie on the ground following a derecho storm near Polo, Illinois, on Aug. 10, 2020. Congress first authorized crop insurance in the 1930s, but participation didn t take off until decades later.
When Dr. Keith Coble was a graduate student looking for a topic to work on, he settled on crop insurance, in part because he d become fascinated with risk and it seemed so relevant to agriculture.
Coble, now a Giles Distinguished Professor and professor in the Agricultural Economic Department at Mississippi State University, started looking at the questions surrounding crop insurance, which at the time in the 1980s was a small program with a reputation for being actuarially unsound with low participation.