Sondersammlungen

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Browsing Sondersammlungen by Journal "Agricultural and Food Economics"

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    Can market fragmentation explain the limited success of political attempts to promote grain legume cultivation in Germany?
    (2025) Mittag, Franziska; Hess, Sebastian
    Grain legumes, such as field peas, field beans, sweet lupins and soybeans, are known to increase biodiversity within the appropriate crop rotation and are an important source of import-substituting feed protein. National and regional policy schemes have long tried to support the cultivation of grain legumes. Although many regions in Germany offer favourable conditions for grain legumes, previous subsidy schemes have failed to increase the area under cultivation and farmers report a lack of market incentives. Indeed, the available price data exhibit a substantial share of non-random missing values in weeks when grain legumes were not traded. We analyse these non-price periods using cointegration tests and single-hurdle Tobit models. The results indicate that regional price formation for grain legumes in German regions depends not only on a minimum quantity of the respective legume crop in supply but also on a favourable supra-regional soybean price: Regional grain legume markets are not integrated and show evidence of a fragmented market structure. This may explain why local grain legume value chains have failed to emerge in Germany, despite decades of policy attempts to support these crops.
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    Comparing hops and malt price transmission in the beer value chain: evidence from Germany
    (2025) Hess, Sebastian; Bublik, Nikolas
    The German beer value chain has received limited attention so far, despite the country’s central role in global beer production. This study investigates the price dynamics of its two key inputs—hops and malt—using monthly price data from 2015 to 2024 based on a unique dataset from a German hops cooperative. While contract farming is common for both raw materials, malt is traded via private firms, whereas hops are marketed almost exclusively through farmer-owned cooperatives. A vector error correction model (VECM) is estimated, incorporating structural break dummies identified through Bai–Perron tests, followed by forecast error variance decomposition (FEVD) and impulse response function (IRF) analysis. The results show that hop prices are largely self-driven and adjust more quickly to deviations from equilibrium than malt or beer prices. While malt and beer exhibit stronger interdependencies, the hop sector displays greater price stability. The findings further reveal that the malting sector responded significantly to the recent energy price crisis in Germany, whereas the hop sector did not.