New chemicals are produced in increasing numbers. In Finland every year about 28 000 different products are manufactured or imported which can be classified as harmful. These products contain about 5000 different harmful substances. We also receive harmful compounds in airborne emissions. Substances are further transformed in industrial processes, in waste management and in the environment by human activities and natural processes. However, only rather limited monitoring data is available about the environmental concentrations of these compounds (concerning about 20–40 substances). The environmental risks of harmful substances can be recognized, assessed and managed by : 1) measuring concentrations in the environment, 2) testing the effects on biota in toxicity tests and 3) monitoring ecosystem changes in the environment. Microbes have a key role in the environment as degraders in the carbon and nutrient cycles. They also have the capability to transform and degrade many harmful man-made substances. Microbes have a strong effect on the exposure of other biota to chemical substances. Hence they can be regarded as primary targets for harmful effects of chemicals or active transformers of chemicals in the environment.The objective of this study was to evaluate the usefulness and applicability of microbial toxicity tests, biodegradation tests and microbial biomass and activity measurements in the environment for the environmental hazard identification and risk assessment of chemicals, effluents and contaminated soils. The study considers both aquatic and soil environments. The effects of modern pulp mill bleaching effluents on biota were assessed by a set of different biotests and by chemical analysis. The effluents and their long term effects on aquatic microbial processes were also studied in outdoor mesocosms. In one part the biodegradation kinetics of carbon-14-labeled model compounds in standard tests and in environmental conditions were measured and compared. The effects of several pesticides on soil microbes were tested and assessed in laboratory tests and in field trials. The applicability of microbial toxicity tests in the assessment of soil pollution and bioremediation processes was also studied in comparison with chemical analysis. The results of the study can support the development and selection of test methods for environmental risk management and regulatory decisions.

This study performs tests developed by Haile et al. (2003) for the common values paradigm in first-price sealed-bid auctions, using data from bus transit auctions in the city of Helsinki. First the bidder's expected costs conditional on winning the auction are estimated using bids following Li et al. (2002). In common costs setting these costs are increasing in the number of bidders whereas with private costs they are invariant. Two tests for stochastic dominance between the cost distributions for different number of bidders are conducted. The first test compares quantile trimmed means and the second is a Kolmogorov-Smirnov type test based on subsampling. This study shows the need for additional robustness checks for some arbitrary choices in these tests. In the means test the choice of quantile does not matter asymptotically and is thus chosen arbitrarily. However the test is not robust to the choice of the quantile in this particular small data set. The second test is not robust to the choice of subsample size, number of subsamples taken or other repetitions of the test in some model specifications. Also pooling and controlling for observed bidder asymmetry are introduced. Results imply that the bus companies that have garages close to the contracted routes operate in an environment where the common costs components dominate the private ones and the bus companies that have garages far from these routes operate in an environment where private cost components dominate the common ones.

Standards for manual pollen and fungal spore monitoring have been established based on several decades of experience, tests, and research. New technological and methodological advancements have led to the development of a range of different automatic instruments for which no standard yet exist. This paper aims to provide an overview of aspects that need to be considered for automatic pollen and fungal spore monitoring, including a set of guidelines and recommendations. It covers issues relevant to developing an automatic monitoring network, from the instrument design and calibration through algorithm development to site selection criteria. Despite no official standard yet existing, it is essential that all aspects of the measurement chain are carried out in a manner that is as standardised as possible to ensure high-quality data and information can be provided to end-users.