Antti Iho

Willingness of farmers to participate in agri-environmental auctions in Finland

Abstract Auctions have been applied in agri-environmental policy, serving as a key tool to overcome information asymmetries and generate important cost savings for governments. The efficiency of agri-environmental auctions depends on ensuring sufficient participation and avoiding a ‘learning by experience’ situation. In designing successful auctions, it is important to acknowledge farmer characteristics that might increase the adaptability of auctions and also recognize whether past experience affects future participation. This paper uses data from an auction experiment conducted in Nurmijärvi, Southern Finland. We account for socio-demographic, spatial and attitude variables and investigate their effect on the probability of past and future auction participation. Due to the small number of actual participants, we employ a relogit model to correct the coefficient estimates derived by a binary logit model. According to the analysis, large-scale farmers are more likely to have participated in the pilot auction, while older farmers, those engaged full time in farming and less well-trained farmers were less likely to be positive towards future auctions. Past participation was positively and significantly related to prospective auctions. Our findings suggest a strong relationship between attitudes and participation, particularly regarding specific environmental benefits attached to the auction scheme, novelty and financial features as well as the complexity of the auction mechanism. The predicted probability for both past and future participation elicited by the relogit model was consistent with the sample probability, and hence by applying a relogit to correct for rare-event bias we derived more reliable estimates.

Impact of advance ticket sales on attendance in the Finnish football league.

The authors analyze the effect of advance ticket sales (ATS) on Finnish football league attendances. We postulate a linear ordinary least squares (OLS) model for log-attendance data from the years 1991-2007. Match day weather, timing of the match, team performance and match characteristics together with team, year, month, and stadium- specific dummies are used as the other explanatory variables. The model explains the data very well. The results of two alternative approaches suggest that offering the option of buying the tickets in advance has had an isolated positive effect on attendance for the associated teams.

Does Scale Matter? Cost Effectiveness of Agricultural Nutrient Abatement When Target Level Varies

Agricultural production is facing high requirements on nutrient runoff reduction. Furthermore, the reductions should by done efficiently. For instance, the European Water Framework Directive calls for cost-effectiveness from schemes of measures to fulfill the target of good water quality in European river basins. In this paper we analyse the implications of target level variation on efficiency properties of agricultural phosphorus abatement. We analyse the robustness of cost-effectiveness as the scheme of measures is adopted from another, identical river basin with different target level on total phosphorus abatement. We find that even between homogeneous regions the cost-effective scheme of measures is unique for all target levels of reduction, and that the costs of adoting cost-effective allocations out of scale are high.