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Despite their growing intensity and the enormous costs, adverse meteorological events are still perceived as "exceptional". Among the adverse weather events, the management of drought risk plays a key role due to the more pressing problem of the scarcity of water resources. In this context, agricultural insurance can represent a financial and risk mitigation tool for farmers. In this perspective, the aims of this study are: (1) to analyze, through a systematic review, the main findings of the scientific literature focused on the empirical and theoretical approach to the relation between adverse weather events in agriculture, risk and insurance; (2) to collect agroclimatic and insurance data for each Italian province for the period 2004-2011, (3) to measure the influence of climatic agroclimatic variables on insurance variables, i.e. Total Premiums, Insured Value and Certificates.The results of the analysis show the significance of the precipitation variable and its negative effect with each insurance dependent variable. The same result can be observed focusing on the effect of minimum temperature on two insurance variables, i.e. Total Premiums and Certificates. Models tested explain a range between 44% and 51% of the variation in our insurance dependent variables.

Using a formal political economy model with asymmetric information, we illustrate the conditions under which an environmental protection system based on extending liability to private financiers is welfare superior, inferior or equivalent to a system based on an incentive regulatory scheme subject to capture by the regulatees. We explicitly consider the following factors: the cost of care and its efficiency in reducing the probability of an environmental accident, the social cost of public funds, the net profitability of the risky activities, the level of damages, and the regulatory capture bias. We characterize in such a parameter space the regions where one system dominates the other.