A spatial econometric approach to designing and rating scalable index insurance in the presence of missing data

Index-Based Livestock Insurance has emerged as a promising market-based solution for insuring livestock against drought-related mortality. The objective of this work is to develop an explicit spatial econometric framework to estimate insurable indexes that can be integrated within a general insurance pricing framework. We explore the problem of estimating spatial panel models when there are missing dependent variable observations and cross-sectional dependence, and implement an estimable procedure which employs an iterative method. We also develop an out-of-sample efficient cross-validation mixing method to optimise the degree of index aggregation in the context of spatial index models.