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,...

Factors such as risk attitude, innovativeness, and financial literacy are crucial in agricultural and forest economics, especially amidst weather and market risks. Hence, understanding them is central for fostering a resilient primary sector. We surveyed 371 German farmers and 215 foresters in...

This article compares the use of risk-increasing and risk-reducing production inputs with the experimentally measured risk attitudes of farmers. For this purpose, the Just-Pope production function indicates production inputs’ influence on output risk and a Holt-Laury lottery is used to measure...

Many economic decision situations of foresters and farmers are characterized by risk. Thereby, the individual risk attitude is of particular interest for understanding decision behaviour and, thus, is fundamental for valuable policy recommendations. The literature provides various methods to...

A farmer’s uncertainty preferences can play a large role in how he makes production decisions on the farm. We attempt to understand how farmers’ household characteristics as well as past harvest shocks affect uncertainty preferences of maize farmers in southern Mexico. By using a series of...