Investment models typically explain only a small share of the total investment variation within or between firms. A reason for this may be that those models do not explicitly differentiate between the decision to invest and the decision about the level of investment. In this paper, a two-steps...

Systemic weather risk is a major obstacle for the formation of private (nonsubsidized) crop insurance. This paper explores the possibility of spatial diversification of insurance by estimating the joint occurrence of unfavorable weather conditions in different locations. For that purpose copula...

While economies of scope of lending and mobilizing deposits in banking are justified theoretically (Diamond, 1984) and found empirically (see Saunders, 1999), in microfinance, the existence and the magnitudes of scope economies has not been investigated. We use a semi parametric smooth...

In this paper we specify and estimate producers’ risk preference using farm data. We allow heterogeneous risk preference across individuals and propose a specification to model the heterogeneity. We base farmers’ decision making on a utility maximization framework and incorporate both market...

The paper investigates the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies on farm total factor productivity (TFP) in the European Union (EU). We employ a structural semi-parametric estimation algorithm directly incorporating the effect of subsidies into a model of unobserved...

The agricultural sectors of Kazakhstan and Germany are at different development levels. One possible explanation for this might be the different investment behavior of farmers. We experimentally analyze whether the investment behavior of farmers is consistent with the normative benchmarks of the...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

It is widely documented that credit is an important instrument among resource poor farmers in developing economies. However, accessing loans from formal credit institutions has proved almost impossible for small and resource poor farmers leading to reliance on the least regulated informal credit...

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