Malpractice in food production entails unacceptable procedures and undesirable product qualities and other negative material outcomes. Despite their physical implications, behavioural sources of risk have become known as moral hazards. The probability of malpractice increases with attached...

German hog production only responds in a very limited way to price fluctuations in the pork market. The hog production concentrates on a few regions though it is not bound to special natural conditions such as soil quality. Furthermore, the volume of production does not vary over time....

Farm-level adaptation to changing economic environments is often slower than expected. Technological innovations, for instance, are frequently adopted at a later date than the net present value of investment suggests. This can be explained by a model of "investment under uncertainty," which...

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...

Purpose – Often farmers do not switch to a new bank even if it offers better interest rates than the house bank. This can be attributed partly to transaction costs, and partly to bounded rationality. The purpose of this paper is to better understand farm borrowers by analyzing the role of...

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...

Purpose – Using a unique dataset of a commercial microfinance institution (MFI) in Tanzania, the purpose of this paper is to investigate first whether agricultural firms have a different probability to get a loan and whether their loans are differently volume rationed than loans to...

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...

Eastern Germany is often hit by drought causing income risk for crop farmers. Index-based risk management instruments could help crop farmers to reduce their farm income risk. Such instruments have some important advantages over damage-based insurance, like e.g. less moral hazard and adverse...