This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of possible causes of considerable production variability that characterised Russian agriculture during the last decade. The study investigates production risk and technical inefficiency as two sources that influence production variability....

This paper analyses regional productivity and technical efficiency development in Russian agriculture. We formulate a regional stochastic frontier model by assuming that producers maximise return to the outlay. We control for regional heterogeneity and endogeneity/simultaneity in input...

Over fifteen years have elapsed since the transition from the centrally planned economic system started in the early 1990âs. During this time agricultural and rural areas of Central and Eastern Europe have undergone profound structural changes with wide variations in the degree of...

We evaluate yield risk reduction through weather index, area yield index and farm yield insurance contracts for wheat farms in Kazakhstan by employing data from 1980 to 2002. We use the usual mean variance (MV) approach and also a second-degree stochastic dominance (SSD) criterion. While MV is...

This paper analyses the investment behaviour of Russian farms during the period of economic stabilisation that followed Russia's financial crisis of 1998, and is the first to apply the error-correction investment model to describe farms' investment behaviour in the transitional context....

An ex post measure of risk reduction is commonly used in the literature to predict the potential reduction of farmers’ yield risk due to weather-based index insurance and area-yield crop insurance. In this paper, we evaluate the predictive power of the ex post risk reduction for different...

Purpose – The design and pricing of weather‐based insurance instruments is strongly based on an implicit assumption that the dependence structure between crop yields and weather variables remains unchanged over time. The purpose of this paper is to verify this critical assumption by...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

We present an international trade model with multiproduct firms. Firms are heterogeneously endowed with two types of capabilities that jointly determine the trade-off within firms between managing a large portfolio of products and producing at low marginal cost. The model can explain many of the...

This paper reports data from a laboratory experiment on two-period moral hazard problems. The findings corroborate the contract-theoretic insight that even though the periods are technologically unrelated, due to incentive considerations principals can benefit from offering long-term contracts...