The curvature properties of the indirect utility function imply a set of refutable implications in the form of comparative static results and symmetric relations for the competitive firm operating under uncertainty. These hypotheses, first derived and empirically tested under output price...

A large body of literature studies the issues of the option price and other ex-antewelfare measures under the microeconomic theory to valuate reductions of risks inherentin environment and human health. However, it does not offer a careful discussion of howto estimate risk reduction values using...

Entrepreneurship means making discrete changes in livelihood activities that involve substantial risks to income. While the rewards may be substantial, transactions costs may make decisions irreversible. This paper draws a comparison between entrepreneurship and technology adoption. Adopting a...

European farmers face increasing income uncertainty and the debate is growing on the role of insurance schemes and of public support in this field. This debate is further stimulated by the perspective of introducing instruments to cope with risk also in the Common Agricultural Policy. Therefore,...

The paper considers the benefit to agricultural producers from commodity price insurance that provides in every year, but in advance of the resolution of production and price uncertainty, a minimum price for a fixed or variable portion of production. Under the assumption that producers do not...

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...

In this paper we price a precipitation option based on empirical weather data from Germany using different pricing methods, among them Burn Analysis, Index Value Simulation and Daily Simulation. For that purpose we develop a daily precipitation model. Moreover, a decorrelation analysis is...

Recent academic discussion regarding crop insurance in developing and transition countries has focused on weather index insurance. But empirical analyses of such schemes based on farm level data cannot be found in the literature, though this insurance type shows clear advantages compared to...

Index-based weather insurances are innovative tools for mitigating weather risks in agriculture.Several donor agencies and development organisations are investing substantially topropagate these programmes in developing countries. However, often due to high basis risks,these products mitigate...

This paper investigates the determinants of rapeseed hail insurance and pesticide use decisions using individualpanel data set of French farms covering the period from 1993 to 2004. Economic theory suggests that insuranceand prevention decisions are not independent due to risk reduction and/or...