For quite some time long-only index funds have been suspected of being responsible for price increases in agricultural futures markets. This suspicion has prompted demands to drastically limit long-only index funds' scope of activity. Such demands and their underlying diagnoses, however,...

Long-only-Indexfonds stehen seit geraumer Zeit unter Verdacht, für die Preisanstiege an landwirtschaftlichen Warenterminmärkten verantwortlich zu sein. Hieraus wird die Forderung abgleitet, den Aktivitätsradius dieser Indexfonds drastisch einzuschränken. Allerdings stehen solche Forderungen...

Agro-food trade between the BRIC countries has increased. Brazil and China contributed to the rapid increase of agro-food trade. The Russian Federation experienced the stagnating and the most volatile agro-food trade over time. The composition of agro-food trade for the BRIC countries varies by...

The reform-process towards a higher world-market orientation has a long tradition in Chile, with all its strengths and weaknesses. The food processing industry is highly competitive on the worldmarket. The following paper investigates the technical efficiency of the Chilean food processing...

This paper investigates determinants of agricultural sector efficiency in ten new member states (NMS-10) of the European Union (EU) from Central and Eastern European countries by the non-parametric method Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the panel data analysis. The agricultural sector...

In this paper we present an empirical analysis of farmers' contracting choice in the Hungarian milk sector using 2005 milk producer survey data, employing transaction cost economics. We focus on analysing some key determinants of farmers' contracting choices: type of contracts, duration, number...

The paper investigates the choice between conventional and organic production technologies for individual farmers in Hungarian agriculture. We employ sequential logit model on a cross-section data set of Hungarian farmers for the period 2007. Our estimations reveal that age of farmers has...

Auf volatileren Agrarmärkten gewinnt der Handel mit Optionen zunehmend an Bedeutung. Optionen gestatten die einseitige Absicherung von Preisrisiken, z. B. nur gegen fallende Preise, und stellen ein zunehmend bedeutenderes Instrument für das Risikomanagement von Landwirten und Landhändlern...

Options trading is increasingly important in more volatile agricultural markets. Options allow for unilateral hedging of price risks, e. g. against falling prices only, and are an indispensable risk management instrument for farmers and grain dealers. Concerns that soaring options trading could...

Since the work of FEENSTRA (2002), the standard ANDERSON & VAN WINCOOP (2003) Gravity Model has been estimated using a fixed effects approach. However, a fixed effects approach has a major drawback: it does not allow for the estimation of exporter- and importer-invariant variables. Thus,...