Investments in agricultural modernization have resulted in remarkable progress in food production over the last century. As a consequence, the global number and the proportion of undernourished people has fallen significantly. Despite this progress, providing sufficient and nutritiously diverse...

Many developing countries are experiencing a food system transformation with a rapid growth of supermarkets. This supermarket growth can be attributed to demand-side factors such as rising incomes, urbanization, and changing lifestyles, as well as supply-side factors, such as market...

This thesis addresses 3 different aspects of food and poverty related problems in developing countries. The first essay presents a new operational concept of transaction costs that firstly allows assessing the magnitude and secondly recognizing the non homogeneity of food products. This is...

The thesis contains three essays in the field of environmental policy. In the first paper, we study the relationship between the agri-environmental payments for farmers and wildlife. The effects of EU agri-environmental programs (AEPs) on the environment have been mixed. Spending on AEPs has...

The vast majority of the efficiency and productivity measurement literature has been based on the static viewpoint of the firm. Few studies have developed the dynamic analog of static efficiency measurement, introducing the notions of long-run efficiency and inefficiency persistence. However,...

The present dissertationis devoted to the issue of price discovery in agricultural markets. Price discovery is considered one of the central functions of financial markets and is usually analyzed empirically for highly homogeneous assets traded on these markets. We investigate whether this...