For quite some time long-only index funds have been suspected of being responsible for price increases in agricultural futures markets. This suspicion has prompted demands to drastically limit long-only index funds' scope of activity. Such demands and their underlying diagnoses, however,...

Long-only-Indexfonds stehen seit geraumer Zeit unter Verdacht, für die Preisanstiege an landwirtschaftlichen Warenterminmärkten verantwortlich zu sein. Hieraus wird die Forderung abgleitet, den Aktivitätsradius dieser Indexfonds drastisch einzuschränken. Allerdings stehen solche Forderungen...

The increased interest in Integrated Assessment (IA) of agricultural systems reflects the growing complexity of policy objectives and corresponding impacts related to this sector. The paper contemplates on the status of quantitative tools for IA in agriculture, drawing on recent European...

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...

Addressing the competitive imbalances in the dairy sector, the High Level Group of dairy market experts proposed written formal contracts between raw milk producers and processors to improve the bargaining position of producers and to stabilize milk supply. However, exclusive contracts, where a...

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...