Risk classification of livestock farms can help stakeholders design and implement risk management measures according to the possessed risk. Our goal is to examine how differently pig farms may contribute to the societal costs of an animal disease outbreak, how valuable this information is to...

A dynamic bio-economic model is used to show that, without technological and policy intervention, soil nutrient balances, income and nutrition could not be substantially or sustainably improved in a highland area of Ethiopia. Although cash incomes could rise from a very low base by more than 50%...

A model to value Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation (Farmer Mac) agricultural mortgage-backed securities (AMBS) is developed and numerically solved. The results suggest prepayment penalties currently being used by Farmer Mac reduce yields on AMBS considerably. Even with prepayment...

Investment decisions are not only characterised by irreversibility and uncertainty but also by flexibility with regard to the timing of the investment. This paper describes how stochastic simulation can be successfully integrated into a backward recursive programming approach in the context of...

This paper analyses investments in green technologies when insurance is also an option. Green technologies are defined to have the power to increase productivity and decrease volatility of future revenues. The insurance options involve the scale and coverage either in a yield insurance or in an...

We conduct models and tests to ascertain whether there are speculative bubbles and which factors contribute to the bubbles if there exits one. In the model, we use the option value to represent the investment value of farm real estate and compare the option value, calculated from dynamic...

An outbreak of foot and mouth disease (FMD) can distort livestock markets. In this paper we have simulated welfare effects due to the risk of a hypothetical FMD outbreak and trade distortions associated with the disease. The analysis was carried out with stochastic dynamic partial-equilibrium...

We investigate the role of risk and learning in biotechnology adoption, with an empirical focus on the adoption of Genetically Modified (GM) corn in the U.S. Corn Belt. Relying on the Kalman filter algorithm, a conceptual structural dynamic programming (DP) model is developed to capture the...

Investment decisions are, as a rule, characterized by uncertainty, irreversibility and flexibility. Simple net present value calculations will not account for these features. In many situations even flexible investment planning with decision trees, which represents the most advanced method of...

PV-optimality in a capital-resource economy can imply decreasing utility over some portion of the time horizon. Various criteria have been proposed to maintain intergenerational equity defined as nondeclining utility, but these have some limitations and problems. This paper proposes a new...