Under the Kyoto Protocol, countries can meet treaty obligations by investing in projects that reduce or sequester greenhouse gases elsewhere. Prior to ratification, treaty participants agreed to launch country-based pilot projects, referred to collectively as Activities Implemented Jointly...

Insuring against crop yield risk is an important task in rural microfinance because such an insurance may improve access to capital for smallholders by substituting for collaterals. However, agricultural crop yield risk is even hard to mitigate in developed countries due to problems of...

Abstract This paper examines the impact of agricultural subsidies on rental rates for grassland. In theory, the capitalization of subsidies into grassland rents has become increasingly important as a result of the decoupling of direct payments from production in 2005. The focus is on the...

We analyse the relative competitiveness between organic and conventional farming under different policy scenarios using a DEA-based non-convex metafrontier model. This model allows us to identify a farm’s ex post optimal technology based on input-output observations. Results for Bavarian dairy...

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...

In this article we propose non-concave metafrontiers for estimating the inefficiency among production functions which do not necessarily belong to the same technology. In this case, estimating a joint production by literature approaches might be inappropriate. We call this inefficiency...

We analyse area yield insurance contracts and weather index insurance contracts in terms of risk reduction for wheat farms in Kazakhstan over the period 1980-2002. We combine the common mean-variance approach with a stochastic dominance approach to ensure the consistency of the empirical results...

This paper explores farmers' willingness to adopt genetically modified (GM) oilseed rape prior to its commercial release and estimates the 'demand' for the new technology. The analysis is based upon choice experiments with 202 German arable farmers. A multinomial probit estimation reveals that...