There is a steady increase in smartphone apps available to improve farmers' decision making with respect to crop protection. While current studies have focused on smartphone adoption in general and farmers' general willingness to pay for crop protection smartphone apps, none have focused on the...

Smartphone apps and the inbuilt-sensors can be seen as a subarea of precision farming technologies. Furthermore, an increase in smartphone-based decision support tools is observed in the last years. While the adoption of smartphones and willingness to pay for apps by farmers were already...

Digital risk management tools (RMTs) are promising to help farmers manage risk. However, these recently developed tools are still unexplored and hardly used by farmers. This study is the first to investigate how German farmers perceive the usefulness of digital RMTs and which factors influence...

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 first paper of this dissertation in Chapter II, “Insurance for Technology Adoption: An Experimental Evaluation of Schemes and Subsidies with Maize Farmers in Mexico”, analyzes experimentally how bundling the purchase of a risky technology, namely a higher yielding maize seed variety,...

Purpose: The expected increase in milk price volatility after the milk quota abolition in the EU will lead to further planning uncertainty on dairy farms. Consequently, the modest supply of insurance and the hedging of milk prices through futures may increase. To shed more light on this...

Purpose: Although the microfinance sector in developing countries has seen an impressive development in recent years, many small-scale farmers in rural areas are still undersupplied with capital. One of the main reasons for this undercapitalization is the exposure to weather risks. Weather...

Purpose: In recent years, the application of credit scoring in urban microfinance institutions (MFIs) became popular, while rural MFIs, which mainly lend to agricultural clients, are hesitating to adopt credit scoring. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether microfinance credit scoring...

Kazakhstan and Germany have different development levels of the agricultural sectors. One of the explanations for this fact might be the different investment behavior of farmers in the two countries. We experimentally analyze whether the investment behavior of farmers is consistent with the...

Financial institutions still neglect to address agricultural clients. The main reasons for that are their perception that farmers bear higher risks than non-farmers and that their loan products are inadequate to accommodate the needs of agricultural entrepreneurs. As a result, many farmers still...