Crop insurance products can improve and stabilize economic performance. However, due to insurance market imperfections, the use of insurance products often requires governmental support. This paper analyses the actual impact of insurance products on the economic performance of cropping farms by...

The study evaluates the effectiveness of a catastrophic drought-index insurance developed by applying two alternative methods - the standard regression analysis and the copula approach. Most empirical analyses obtain estimates of the dependence of crop yields on weather by employing linear...

The application of yield time series in risk analysis prerequisites the estimation of technological trend which might be present in the data. In this paper, we show that in presence of highly volatile yield time series and non-constant technology, the consideration of the weather effect in the...

Comparing different organizational, managerial and economic indicators of the farms in two selected regions the study investigates whether agroholdings perform better and thus can be regarded as a promising organizational model for Russian agriculture. A comparatively poor performance of...

The study introduces an ex-ante evaluation concept into the analysis of weather-based index insurance effectiveness. We conduct our ex ante analysis by distinguishing between two consecutive periods: the first period is used for determining insurance parameters and optimal number of insurance...

The paper evaluates the effectiveness of several index-based crop insurance schemes by comparing results from two alternative evaluation approaches. We apply the common ex post approach from the literature by specifying and evaluating insurance contracts by means of the data for the same...

The study analyzes the investment behavior of Russian farms during the period of economic stabilization that followed the financial crisis of 1998. While the literature primarily uses accelerator and adjustment costs models to describe farms investment behavior in the context of transition...

We present an approach that pursues an adequate representation of product transformation possibilities for a technology generating, in addition to marketed (good) products, some environmentally detrimental non-marketed byproducts (bad outputs). As the shadow price of a non-marketed output...

Limited budget for the purchase of variable inputs might adversely affect producer's input use decisions and might result in a non-optimal input usage. If expenditure constrains are present and binding, unconstrained profit-maximization is not valid for modelling producers' input use decisions....

This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of possible causes of considerable production variability that characterised Russian agriculture during the last decade. The study investigates production risk and technical inefficiency as two sources that influence production variability....