Agriculture seems to be capable to foster rehabilitation, work integration and social inclusion of vulnerable people: persons with mental disabilities, people with burn out, long-term unemployed, individuals with an addiction history, and so on. "Social farms", i.e. farms that provide these kind...

The addition of commodities to financial portfolios and resulting weight adjustments may create volatility linkages between commodity and financial markets, especially during financial crises. Also, biofuel mandates are suspected to integrate agricultural and energy markets. We calculate...

This paper decomposes the variance in food industry return-on-assets into year, country, industry, and firm effects. Besides these main effects, we include several interactions and discuss their theoretical foundations. After determining effect significance in a nested ANOVA with a rotating...

Using a panel data set for about 70 countries, this paper jointly analyzes agri-investment trends and food security developments in vulnerable countries. This work empirically connects two mainly independent debates about impacts of agri-investments on food security and on the proposed...

We use two methodological approaches to analyze avian influenza related quarantine measures. First, a Heckman type gravity model is used to estimate the trade impact and second, a spatial partial equilibrium simulation model is developed to simulate welfare changes. The simulation model...

Challenges arising from the EU policy focus on rural development lead to an increased demand for farm structure analyses at a regional level. The study’s aim is to show (1) which way structural change differs across EU15 regions referring to size and production orientation and (2) how far...

This paper reviews studies analyzing the determinants of spatial dynamic dairy production. The review distinguishes three dimensions that may contribute to spatial dynamics: farm level determinants related to factor endowment, technology, and production costs; developments and differences at the...

We develop a Bayesian estimation framework for non-stationary Markov models for situations where both sample data on observed transitions between states (micro data) and population data, where only the proportion of individuals in each state is observed (macro data), are available. Posterior...

In 2010, the European (EU) High Level Expert Group on milk proposed the introduction of standard contracts between raw milk producers and processors to improve the bargaining position of producers and to stabilize the market by balancing dairy supply and demand. However, contracts may distort...

Meat is one the most important products concerning sales in the food retail sector in industrialised countries. Confirming Eurostat (2007), almost 45% of the agricultural output in the EU 15 comes from meat. However, production figures of some meat products, especially beef, declined...