The present dissertation is twofold and takes up several issues in two separate and independent articles. In chapter II, the hedging effectiveness of weather index-based insurance with regard to aggregation biases in the underlying risk exposure of aggregated yield time series is presented. The...

The increasing share of imported food in developed countries, such as the U.S. and European Union countries, poses new challenges for food safety and quality regulators. China, as the world's biggest food producer, has the fastest growing share of fish and shellfish exports to these countries....

The increasing share of imported food in developed countries, such as the U.S. and European Union countries, poses new challenges for food safety and quality regulators. China as the world's biggest food producer has the fastest growing share of fish and shellfish exports to these countries....

This framework is a part of a bilateral research cooperation project between Bulgaria and China on “Governing and Assessment of Agrarian Sustainability - Experiences, Challenges, and Lessons from Bulgaria and China” funded by the Bulgarian Science Fund and the Ministry of Science and...

This study examines the impacts of a large-scale government-led microcredit program on informal risk sharing among poor households in rural China based on a randomized controlled trial. The results show that financial inclusion, on average, reduced households’ borrowing from informal financial...

Using data from a randomized experiment in rural China, this paper studies the influence of social networks on the decision to adopt a new weather insurance product and the mechanisms through which social networks operate. We provided financial education to a random subset of farmers and found a...

We consider whether participation in cooperative organizations known as Farm Bases correlates with a farmer's risk attitudes in China. Specifically, we seek to determine if farmers see cooperative-like organizations as a means of reducing risk or as a way of accessing riskier opportunities....

Abstract: Informal risk-sharing is often cited as a key factor for sustainable poverty alleviation in developing countries, but the lack of implicit contract enforcement remains an important problem. Using data from the China Labor-force Dynamic Survey (CLDS), we find that Confucian culture has...

Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, and processors and agro-exporters' agricultural value chains have begun to transform the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework through which to study contracting between...

While much research on China has focused on rural to urban migration and transitions of rural households away from agriculture, little is known about the changes within the rural agricultural sector. Yet, the agricultural sector continues to account for a large share of employment. We study the...