This article analyses determinants of the investment behaviour of Russian farms during the period of economic stabilisation after the 1998 financial crisis. We argue that the performance and investment activity of Russian farms are significantly affected not only by the macroeconomic and...

An ex post measure of risk reduction is commonly used in the literature to predict the potential reduction of farmers’ yield risk due to weather-based index insurance and area-yield crop insurance. In this paper, we evaluate the predictive power of the ex post risk reduction for different...

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...

We present an approach that pursues an adequate representation of product transformation possibilities for a technology generating, in addition to marketed (good) products, some environmentally detrimental non-marketed byproducts (bad outputs). As the shadow price of a non-marketed output...

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...

Crop insurance products can improve and stabilize economic performance. However, due to insurance market imperfections, the use of insurance products often requires governmental support. This paper analyses the actual impact of insurance products on the economic performance of cropping farms by...

We analyze the current state and future requirements of an agricultural income stabilization mechanism in a transition country – namely, the crop insurance system in Kazakhstan. Three objectives will be pursued: First, factors influencing the development of the crop insurance market will be...

Farmers in most OECD countries are engaged in different activities which go beyond agriculture. When assessing farm performance, it is appropriate to model these heterogeneous farm outputs separately. In this study, we use the distance function approach, which allows the consideration of...

We conduct an examination of the climate effect to analyze the historical dependence of grain production on temperatures and precipitation levels, and project this dependence to estimate the productivity of different grain types in the mid- and long-terms, given four greenhouse gas concentration...