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Study on risk attitudes of farmers
Farming is a business full of uncertainty. Risk is not only about whether it will rain enough or whether a pest will ruin crops. Farmers also have little control on the price they pay for inputs or on how much they will receive for their produce, not to mention the risk of policy makers changing laws and regulation. To understand the agricultural sector, economists want to set up models which account for these risks, and they also want these models to include a good understanding of how much farmers would like to take or avoid risks. A first step for this is to know how risk loving or risk averse farmers are. As there are many ways to measure risk attitudes, another challenge is to make sure that the same method is applied to all farmers to get comparable results.
A team of 28 researchers, including colleagues from our Business Economics group, has recently studied risk attitudes of 1,430 farmers from eleven European countries. The following video provides a summary of the study and the results:
The study was published in English in the journal Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy and is freely available under this link:https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13330