In Anbetracht zunehmender Einkommensschwankungen aufgrund von Witterungsextremen und höherer Volatilitäten an den Agrarrohstoffmärkten fordert der Deutsche Bauernverband im Ertragsteuerrecht die Einführung einer Risikoausgleichsrücklage für landwirtschaftliche Einkünfte....

Food risks may be caused by moral hazard, i.e. by opportunistic behaviour of upstream sellers who exploit the fact that many food product qualities remain uncertain to downstream buyers in the course of conventional market transactions (credence qualities). Due to this lack of market...

Optimization has been recognized as a powerful tool in teaching and research for a long time. In spite of its well known problem solving capacity, some methodological obstacles have persisted over the years. The main problem is that stochastic variables and their correlations cannot be...

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...

Since the mid-nineties, agricultural economists discuss the suitability of “weather derivatives†as hedging instruments for volumetric risks in agriculture. Contrary to traditional insurance contracts, the payoffs of such derivatives are linked to weather indices (e.g. accumulated...

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...

In this paper we examine whether there is room for improvement in farm program decisions through the integration of formal mathematical optimisation into the planning process. Probing the potential for improvement, we investigate the cases of four Brandenburg cash crop farms over the last six...

Against the background of diverse food scandals this article investigates the role of trust as a determinant of consumer behaviour in Germany. As empirical analyses indicate, the impact of trust on consumer behaviour in a quotidian and presumably safe setting is to be neglected. In the...

In this article, legal consequences of the new German genetic engineering act are analyzed. In addition environmental economic analysis is presented of those parts of the act that introduce new litigation regulation to farmers. The different kinds of external costs arising from genetic...