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Corporate financial decision making processes (selection of investments and funding sources) are becoming increasingly complex because of the growing number of conflicting criteria that need to be considered. The main aim of this paper is to perform a bibliometric analysis of the international research on the application of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques to corporate finance issues during the period 1980-2012. A total of 347 publications from the Scopus database have been compiled, classified and analysed. The results obtained confirm: a) an increase in the importance of MCDM in corporate finance; b) the relevance of MCDM techniques in capital budgeting processes (fixed assets investment) and in the assessment of firms' economic and financial performance; c) the techniques based on the multiple attribute utility theory (MAUT) are the most popular in complex decision making situations as they are very simple to implement. || Los procesos de decisión de selección de inversiones y de las fuentes de financiación de las empresas se caracterizan por una creciente complejidad, dada la confluencia del cada vez mayor número de criterios a considerar. El objetivo de este trabajo es realizar un análisis bibliométrico de la producción científica internacional que ha abordado la problemática asociada a las finanzas corporativas mediante la implementación del paradigma de Decisión Multicriterio (MCDM) durante el periodo 1980-2012. Un total de 347 publicaciones han sido recopiladas de la base de datos de Scopus, clasificadas y analizadas. De los resultados obtenidos cabe destacar lo siguiente: a) se ha producido un considerable incremento del uso de las técnicas multicriterio en finanzas corporativas; b) las técnicas MCDM se han empleado fundamentalmente en la selección de inversiones productivas, evidenciándose igualmente su utilidad para la evaluación de la situación económico-financiera de las empresas; c) las técnicas basadas en la teoría de la utilidad multiatributo (MAUT) han sido las más empleadas, dada su relativa sencillez operativa.

Within the same agricultural system, there is substantial heterogeneity in farms’ performance depending on farms’ structural features and farmers’ decision-making. This paper proposes a policy-oriented farm typology-building approach that groups farms in the same agricultural system into categories based on their economic and environmental performance. For this purpose, latent profile analysis (LPA) is used, since it enables both the assessment of profile-specific synergies/trade-offs among performance indicators and the implementation of a three-step procedure to account for the covariates that characterize the resulting farm profiles. As an illustrative case study, this methodological proposal is applied to categorize Spanish farms included in the rain-fed field crops agricultural system. The results show that the proposed typology-building approach is useful for agricultural policy-making, as it allows for a better evaluation of how farms contribute to the achievement of policy objectives and the design of differentiated policy instruments accounting for the performance synergies/trade-offs across farm profiles (i.e. policy tailoring and targeting). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the viability of precautionary savings as a hydrological drought risk management instrument in irrigated agriculture. To that end, first, the drought savings account (DSA) is proposed as a personal savings account to which farmers make regular contributions, with withdrawals allowed in the event of water supply gaps to guarantee a minimum income. Second, the implementation of the proposed instrument is empirically assessed in an illustrative case study using an innovative simulation approach. Results obtained suggest the DSA is actuarially sound, supporting its implementation as a cost-effective instrument to hedge hydrological drought risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]