Purpose – This paper illustrates that natural disasters can significantly threaten financial institutions serving the poor. The authors test the case of a microfinance institution (MFI) in Northern Peru, where severe El Niño events create catastrophic flooding. Design/methodology/approach –...

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to evaluate the financial performance measures calculated and reported by the Economic Resource Service (ERS) from Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) data. The evaluation includes the calculation method and the underlying assumptions used...

This study examines whether the local competition for corn to produce ethanol has lead to significantly higher prices for farmers located close to ethanol biorefineries. If any, such price premiums for spatial closeness would be in addition to the general level of corn price changes experienced...

This study examines the role that food consumer cooperatives play in the local food networks. Data are collected from three case studies with leading food cooperatives and a national survey of the general managers of food cooperatives. We identify the emerging business practices in local...

Purpose – For many farm families and operators across the OECD countries, off-farm income has become a major determinant of their well-being. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential role of off-farm employment as a risk management tool among farm operators....

Purpose – US decoupled direct payments, paid to farm operators based on historic yields and base acreage under the 2002 Farm Bill, may alter a farmer's access to credit or his ability to meet debt servicing obligations. More specifically, direct payments might improve the farmer's liquidity...

This article estimates the effect of diversification on farm values, where farms are valued relative to the median specialized farm having the same enterprise. Using data from the Agricultural Resource Management Study, the estimated diversification discount in agriculture is similar to the...

We examine how farm characteristics affect marketing contract decisions. We relax the restrictive assumptions of Tobit, Poisson, and multinomial logit models and consider the quantity, frequency, and contract type decisions conditional on, rather than jointly with, the contract adoption...

Credit risk models are developed and used to estimate capital requirements for agricultural lenders under the New Basel Capital Accord. The study uses credit value-at-risk methods to calculate probability of default, loss given default, and expected and unexpected losses. Two applied models,...