Purpose – Since the 1990s, there has been a discussion about the use of weather index‐based insurance, also called weather derivatives, as a new instrument to hedge against volumetric risks in agriculture. It particularly differs from other insurance schemes by pay‐offs being related to...

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...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which weather index-based insurances can contribute to reducing shortfall risks of revenues of a representative average farm that produces corn or wheat in the North China Plain (NCP). The geographical basis risk is quantified to...

Purpose – Since the 1990s, there has been a discussion about the use of weather index-based insurance, also called weather derivatives, as a new instrument to hedge against volumetric risks in agriculture. It particularly differs from other insurance schemes by pay-offs being related to...

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: Adoption rates of commodity futures contracts among farmers are rather low in Europe despite their political support. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) can contribute to the understanding of farmers’ intention to use commodity...