The importance of weather as a production factor in agriculture is well established long time and a significant portion of yield fluctuations is caused by weather risks. Traditionally, farmers have tried to hedge against unfavorable weather using insurance, such as crop insurance. In recent...

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...

We used the well-being evaluation method, a technique for measuring individual utility, to study how people in the wildland urban interface of Colorado (USA) felt about their lives before and after two wildfire scenarios. Variables such as age, family size, fire frequency, and house value were...

R&D spending in New Zealand is a mixture of private and public investment undertaken to improve productive activity and efficiency. Investment is split fairly equally between private business, government organisations and the universities. It is a long term investment with some uncertainty about...

This paper discusses the real options approach to investment. Real options facilitate an analysis of investment under uncertainty explicitly taking into account irreversibility of the investment decision and flexibility with respect to the investment timing. This is achieved by exploiting the...

It is well documented that ‘‘unanticipated’’ information contained in United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) crop reports induces large price reactions in corn and soybean markets. Thus, a natural question that arises from this literature is: To what extent are futures hedges...

O presente estudo tem como objetivo, usando simulações, analisar as operações dehedge com contratos de boi gordo da Bolsa de Mercadorias & Futuros (BM&F). Assimulações compreenderam o período de 2001 a 2006, sendo que em todos os anos oscontratos simulados são do mesmo vencimento,...

Various forms of revenue insurance have been applied in Canada and in the US with relative success. In this paper different combinations of traditional agricultural policies and revenue and yield insurance are analysed for the Spanish olive oil sector. Taking a database containing about half...