An adequate representation of the technological trend component of yield time series is of crucial importance for the successful design of risk management instruments. However, for many transition and developing countries, the estimation of the technological trend is complicated by the joint...

This paper examines the impact of technical efficiency on the optimal exit timing of farms in a stochastic dynamic framework. Starting from a standard real options approach, we incorporate technical efficiency via a production function and derive an optimal price trigger at which farms...

We analyze the speed of mean reversion (k) in the convenience yield and the spot price volatility for 7 US commodities between 1989-2012. In the hog market k is large, soybeans exhibit the lowest values. While for 5 of 7 commodities κ is lower in the more recent period (2005-2012) than in the...

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...

The objective of this paper is to investigate the performance of different Value-at-Risk (VaR) models in the context of risk assessment in hog production. The paper starts with a description of traditional VaR models, i.e. Variance-Covariance-Method (VCM) and Historical Simulation (HS). We...

Weather risk is one of the main causes for income fluctuation in agriculture. Since 1997, the economic consequences of weather risk can be insured with weather derivatives, which are offered for many different weather events, such as temperature, rainfall, snow or hurricanes. It is well known...

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...

Systemic weather risk is a major obstacle for the formation of private (nonsubsidized) crop insurance. This paper explores the possibility of spatial diversification of insurance by estimating the joint occurrence of unfavorable weather conditions in different locations. For that purpose copula...

The existing literature on dynamic efficiency is deterministic and ignores uncertainty when deriving dynamic efficiency measures, even though it is known that uncertainty affects the optimal adjustment path and the optimal use of quasi-fixed factors. Here, we contribute to closing this gap by...