This discussion paper considers insurance as a possible instrument of farm income stabilization and compares several crop insurance products with respect to their applicability in a transition economy using the case of Kazakhstan. The analysis is based on a qualitative evaluation as well a...

The paper evaluates the effectiveness of several index-based crop insurance schemes by comparing results from two alternative evaluation approaches. We apply the common ex post approach from the literature by specifying and evaluating insurance contracts by means of the data for the same...

The study analyzes the investment behavior of Russian farms during the period of economic stabilization that followed the financial crisis of 1998. While the literature primarily uses accelerator and adjustment costs models to describe farms investment behavior in the context of transition...

This study investigates production risk and technical inefficiency as two possible sources of the production variability that characterised Russian agriculture during the last decade. The empirical analysis is conducted using panel data from 1996 to 2001 on 443 large agricultural enterprises...

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 employing...

The study develops the methodology for a copula-based weather index insurance rating. As the copula approach is better suited for modeling tail dependence than the standard linear correlation method, we suppose that copulas are more adequate for pricing a weather index insurance contract against...

An adequate representation of the technological trend component of yield time series is of crucial importance for the successful design of risk management instruments. However, for many transition and developing countries, the estimation of the technological trend is complicated by the joint...

Efficiency in microfinance requires accounting for a specific ambiguous production goal. Beyond financial performance, microfinance institutions are to be assessed with regard to their social impact. Based on a comprehensive data collection campaign on 15 Bulgarian agricultural credit...