Heterogeneous impacts of the spot check‐list program in US crop insurance: A disaggregated analysis at the crop level

Abstract This article examines the heterogeneous impacts of the “Spot Check List” (SCL) on producer claims filing behavior across five major crops. Our proposed empirical approach takes into account all the salient data features, namely, state dependence, nonnegativeness of the dependent variable, two‐way fixed effects, observed heterogeneity, as well as potentially endogenous control variables. Our results show that the SCL program is effective in reducing the amount of claims filed by producers of corn, soybeans, and cotton, but there is no evidence that it has a statistically significant impact on producers of wheat and tobacco.