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,...

This paper assesses the impacts of decoupled government transfers on production decisions of a sample of Kansas farms observed from 1996 to 2001. Our model allows for risk, risk attitudes and the intertemporal investment decisions. We also allow for different adjustments of the decision...

Modeling crop yield distributions has been an important topic in agricultural production and risk analysis, and nonparametric methods have gained attention for their flexibility in describing the shapes of yield density functions. In this article, we apply a nonparametric method to model joint...

The onus on landholders in relation to environmental performance is ever increasing. One toolfor achieving environmental improvements is the design and promotion of region-specific‘best management practices’ (BMPs). These are conservation practices aimed at reducingdiffuse source pollution...

Food risks may be caused by moral hazard, i.e. by opportunisticbehaviour of upstream sellers who exploit the fact that many foodproduct qualities remain uncertain to downstream buyers in thecourse of conventional market transactions (credence qualities).Due to this lack of market transparency...

Since the mid-nineties, agricultural economists discuss the suitability of “weather derivatives” as hedging instruments for volumetric risks in agriculture. Contrary to traditional insurance contracts, the payoffs of such derivatives are linked to weather indices (e.g. accumulated rainfall...

The objective of this paper is to investigate the performance of different Value-at-Risk (VaR) models in the context of risk assessment in hog production. The paper starts with a description of traditional VaR models, i.e. Variance-Covariance-Method (VCM) and Historical Simulation (HS). We...