Poliittisesta aluetutkimuksesta konfliktinsäätelyteoriaan : radikalismi suomalaisen valtio-opin tutkimuskohteena 1950-luvulta 1970-luvulle

Abstract: From a political science of regions to conflict regulation theory. The study of radicalism in Finnish political science from the 1950s to the 1970s

Epäasianmukainen verontorjunta ympäristöverotuksessa

Epäasianmukaisella verontorjunnalla kannustintyyppisten ympäristöverojen yhteydessä tarkoitetaan sitä, että veron määrä vähenee ilman ympäristön tilan paranemista. Tutkimuksessa selvitetään, millaisia epäasianmukaisia verontorjuntakeinoja ympäristöveroihin liittyy, kuinka paljon niissä on kyse lainsäädäntöteknisistä valinnoista sekä lainsäädännön puutteellisuudesta ja kuinka ympäristöverotusta voitaisiin mahdollisesti parantaa. Esitys painottuu normatiiviseen sääntelyteoriaan eli siihen, minkälainen ohjauskeino tai sääntely palvelee parhaiten tietyn yhteiskuntapoliittisen päämäärän saavuttamista. Päästöt ovat usein suorassa suhteessa tuotteen ominaisuuksiin, mutta ympäristöverot eivät. Ongelmalliseksi muodostuvat lisäksi veronalennukset, kuten veroporrastukset ja veron palautukset. Nämä kannustavat epäasianmukaiseen verontorjuntaan, kuten yritysjärjestelyihin, hamstraukseen ja esimerkiksi jätteiden sijoittamiseen kaatopaikkojen ulkopuolelle. Epäasianmukaista verontorjuntaa voidaan ehkäistä muun muassa kiristämällä rangaistuksia, tiedottamalla, kaventamalla normaaliverokohtelun ja lievennetyn verokohtelun eroa sekä verotuksen kohdetta muuttamalla. Tärkeintä tulevaisuudessa olisi kuitenkin keskittyä kansainväliseen yhteistyöhön ja ympäristöverotuksen yhdenmukaistamiseen.

Suljetun sähkönjakeluverkon regulaatio teollisuusympäristössä

Tässä työssä tutkitaan suljetun jakeluverkon regulaatiota yhden suomalaisen teollisuussähköverkon näkökulmasta ja sitä verrataan olemassa olevaan energiaviraston jakeluverkkoja koskevaan säätelymalliin. Työssä tutkitaan verkkoyhtiön kehittämän säätelymallin toimivuutta ja sitä kuinka se täyttää hyvän valvontamallin ominaispiirteet. Tässä työssä ei ole tarkoituksena esittää uutta valvontamallia, vaan tutkia ja arvioida olemassa olevia malleja. Työssä käydään läpi olemassa oleva kolmannen valvontajakson regulaatiomalli sekä muutokset, joita on esitetty tuleville valvontakausille. Työssä taustoitetaan valvontatoimintaa myös yleisen talousteorian ja valvontateorioiden avulla. Tämän taustoituksen avulla tarkastellaan teollisuussähköverkkojen erityisiä ominaisuuksia ja edelleen tutkitun teollisuussähköverkon korkeita käyttövaatimuksia ja syitä tällaisille vaatimuksille. Verkkoyhtiön käyttämä tariffimalli kuvataan myös sen liittyessä sääntelyyn saumattomasti. Työssä todistettiin mallin toimivuus tämän kaltaisessa toimintaympäristössä, jossa käyntivarmuusvaatimus on erittäin korkea. Havainnoissa myös korostuu mallin pitkäjänteisyys ja ennustettavuus. Laskentaesimerkkien avulla arvioidaan liittymähinnoittelun kohtuullisuutta asiakkaalle ja mallin toimivuutta yleensä. Näissä tarkasteluissa havaittiin, että yleisellä tasolla liittymähinnoittelu on kohtuullista asiakkaalle ja se mahdollistaa asiakkaan pääomien tehokkaamman käytön kuin ilman verkkoyhtiötä. Kehittämiskohteina tuodaan esille keskeytyksistä aiheutuvien haittojen käsittely ja se, ettei tällaiseen verkkoympäristöön ole tällä hetkellä toimivaa mittaria, jolla voitaisiin arvioida kuinka hyvin verkkoyhtiö toimii.

Regulation of Electricity Transmission and Distribution in Russia

The regulation of electricity transmission and distribution business is an essential issue for any electricity market; it is widely introduced in developed electricity markets of Great Britain, Scandinavian countries and United States of America and other. Those markets which were liberalized recently also need well planned regulation model to be chosen and implemented. In open electricity markets the sectors of electricity distribution and transmission remain monopolies, so called "natural monopolies", as introducing the competition into these sectors in most cases appears to be inefficient. Thatis why regulation becomes very important as its main tasks are: to set reasonable tariffs for customers, to ensure non-discriminating process of electricity transmission and distribution, at the same time to provide distribution companies with incentives to operate efficiently and the owners of the companies with reasonable profits as well; the problem of power quality should be solved at the same time. It should be mentioned also, that there is no incentive scheme which will be suitable for any conditions, that is why it is essential to study differentregulation models in order to form the best one for concrete situation. The aim of this Master's Thesis is to give an overview over theregulation of electricity transmission and distribution in Russia. First, the general information about theory of regulation of natural monopolies will be described; the situation in Russian network business and the importance of regulation process for it will be discussed next. Then there is a detailed description ofexisting regulatory system and the process of tariff calculation with an example. And finally, in the work there is a brief analysis of problems of present scheme of regulation, an attempt to predict the following development of regulationin Russia and the perspectives and risks connected to regulation which could face the companies that try to enter Russian electricity market (such as FORTUM OY).

Performance benchmarking and incentive regulation – considerations of directing signals for electricity distribution companies

After the restructuring process of the power supply industry, which for instance in Finland took place in the mid-1990s, free competition was introduced for the production and sale of electricity. Nevertheless, natural monopolies are found to be the most efficient form of production in the transmission and distribution of electricity, and therefore such companies remained franchised monopolies. To prevent the misuse of the monopoly position and to guarantee the rights of the customers, regulation of these monopoly companies is required. One of the main objectives of the restructuring process has been to increase the cost efficiency of the industry. Simultaneously, demands for the service quality are increasing. Therefore, many regulatory frameworks are being, or have been, reshaped so that companies are provided with stronger incentives for efficiency and quality improvements. Performance benchmarking has in many cases a central role in the practical implementation of such incentive schemes. Economic regulation with performance benchmarking attached to it provides companies with directing signals that tend to affect their investment and maintenance strategies. Since the asset lifetimes in the electricity distribution are typically many decades, investment decisions have far-reaching technical and economic effects. This doctoral thesis addresses the directing signals of incentive regulation and performance benchmarking in the field of electricity distribution. The theory of efficiency measurement and the most common regulation models are presented. The chief contributions of this work are (1) a new kind of analysis of the regulatory framework, so that the actual directing signals of the regulation and benchmarking for the electricity distribution companies are evaluated, (2) developing the methodology and a software tool for analysing the directing signals of the regulation and benchmarking in the electricity distribution sector, and (3) analysing the real-life regulatory frameworks by the developed methodology and further develop regulation model from the viewpoint of the directing signals. The results of this study have played a key role in the development of the Finnish regulatory model.

Professional sports and gambling regulation in Finland - Examining the institutional factors of gambling affecting professional sport clubs in Finland

This study examines how to institutional environment of gambling is currently in motion both in Europe and Finland. Furthermore, it examines the criticism by Finnish professional sport clubs directed towards the national gambling monopolies, especially Veikkaus Oy. This criticism addresses the acclaimed issue of low or non-existing sponsorship funds coming to the clubs despite the clubs’ duties to promote Veikkaus Oy in their stadiums etc. In essence the main research objective was to examine the interaction and institutional environments of both Finnish professional sport clubs and gambling regulation. This was done through three sub-objectives: 1) to analyze professional sport as business and its institutional environment 2) to analyze the institutions of gambling in their current state and their potential future 3) to evaluate the potential impact of an institutional change in gambling legislation to the professional sport clubs The findings from Finland were then compared to those of Denmark where an institutional change had occurred in gambling regulation. Empirical data was collected through multiple interviews. Interviewees represented sport clubs (7), sport association (1), sport league (1), Finnish monopoly representatives (2), commercial gambling providers (1), Danish monopoly system representatives (1), Danish sport club (1). In addition a vast amount of secondary data (e.g. Green and white books by EU, court decisions, a variety of studies etc.). Theoretically this study combines the aspects of institutional theory with the theory of professional sports as business. This proved to be a rather new approach and no published literature was found to have done specifically this. The findings of this study are twofold, on the European level it is clear that the momentum if towards a more liberated gambling market while Finland is at the moment trying to go the opposite direction and uphold its monopoly. From the sport club’s level the findings suggest that currently sport clubs do not directly benefit from the funds originated from Veikkaus Oy as these funds are more or less used on the association/league levels. However, the clubs themselves are also lacking in self-criticism as they are lacking in clear sponsorship packages/programs which Veikkaus Oy might be interested in participating. If liberation of the gambling market would occur it is highly possible that that the largest clubs in football and ice-hockey would be the main beneficiaries while smaller clubs and sports could possibly be worse off than currently. These interpretations were well supported by the findings from Denmark.

Competitive Effects of Non-Controlling Minority Acquisitions – Sufficient to merit further EU merger regulation?

Partial ownership interests are a widespread phenomenon in modern corporate environment. Unless minority shareholding affords the target to exercise control over the target, they do currently not have to be notified to the European Commission under EU merger regime. However, economic research has long suggested that when linking competing or non-horizontally positioned undertakings particularly in industries with few competitors, minority shareholdings even far below the majority of shares or voting rights could lead to higher prices or lower output volumes to the detriment of consumers. The Commission has recognized this issue and proceeded to suggest an extension of the merger regime to catch also certain non-controlling minority acquisitions. Horizontal non-controlling minority shareholdings create a positive correlation between the sales revenues of the partial acquirer and target. Through the equity interest the acquirer will internalise a fraction, proportional to the financial rights attached to the shareholding, of the profit of the target. This will incentivise the acquirer to contribute to increasing the target’s business profits by increasing its own sales price (horizontal unilateral effects). When a minority stake is held in a vertically related or a conglomerate company, the minority acquirer could be allowed to hamper or eliminate the target’s rivals’ access either to inputs (input foreclosure) or customers (customer foreclosure), depending on which level of the supply chain the parties are (vertical unilateral effects). Under certain circumstances minority share acquisitions could also lessen competition because they facilitate collusion between companies active in the market (coordinated effects). Economic theory confirms that non-controlling minority shareholdings may under certain circumstances create anti-competitive effects that are unlikely to be remedies by pro-competitive effects. However, they are likely to be of less significant nature than anticompetitive effects created by full mergers. This derives fore mostly from the fact that a minority share acquirer carries all the costs associated with its unilateral action but will internalise only a fraction of the lost profits. This is likely to limit the acquirer’s incentive to raise price and the profitability of such behavior. Having in mind that the number of potentially problematic cases is expected to be next to negligible, the limited potential competitive effects of non-controlling minority share acquisitions cannot be seen to clearly merit extension of the scope of the EUMR. The system suggested by the Commission is particularly ill-fitted for such purpose given the clear lack of legal certainty and considerable administrative burden associated with it.

University students’ regulation of learning and text processing – examples from medical and teacher education

The general aim of the thesis was to study university students’ learning from the perspective of regulation of learning and text processing. The data were collected from the two academic disciplines of medical and teacher education, which share the features of highly scheduled study, a multidisciplinary character, a complex relationship between theory and practice and a professional nature. Contemporary information society poses new challenges for learning, as it is not possible to learn all the information needed in a profession during a study programme. Therefore, it is increasingly important to learn how to think and learn independently, how to recognise gaps in and update one’s knowledge and how to deal with the huge amount of constantly changing information. In other words, it is critical to regulate one’s learning and to process text effectively. The thesis comprises five sub-studies that employed cross-sectional, longitudinal and experimental designs and multiple methods, from surveys to eye tracking. Study I examined the connections between students’ study orientations and the ways they regulate their learning. In total, 410 second-, fourth- and sixth-year medical students from two Finnish medical schools participated in the study by completing a questionnaire measuring both general study orientations and regulation strategies. The students were generally deeply oriented towards their studies. However, they regulated their studying externally. Several interesting and theoretically reasonable connections between the variables were found. For instance, self-regulation was positively correlated with deep orientation and achievement orientation and was negatively correlated with non-commitment. However, external regulation was likewise positively correlated with deep orientation and achievement orientation but also with surface orientation and systematic orientation. It is argued that external regulation might function as an effective coping strategy in the cognitively loaded medical curriculum. Study II focused on medical students’ regulation of learning and their conceptions of the learning environment in an innovative medical course where traditional lectures were combined wth problem-based learning (PBL) group work. First-year medical and dental students (N = 153) completed a questionnaire assessing their regulation strategies of learning and views about the PBL group work. The results indicated that external regulation and self-regulation of the learning content were the most typical regulation strategies among the participants. In line with previous studies, self-regulation wasconnected with study success. Strictly organised PBL sessions were not considered as useful as lectures, although the students’ views of the teacher/tutor and the group were mainly positive. Therefore, developers of teaching methods are challenged to think of new solutions that facilitate reflection of one’s learning and that improve the development of self-regulation. In Study III, a person-centred approach to studying regulation strategies was employed, in contrast to the traditional variable-centred approach used in Study I and Study II. The aim of Study III was to identify different regulation strategy profiles among medical students (N = 162) across time and to examine to what extent these profiles predict study success in preclinical studies. Four regulation strategy profiles were identified, and connections with study success were found. Students with the lowest self-regulation and with an increasing lack of regulation performed worse than the other groups. As the person-centred approach enables us to individualise students with diverse regulation patterns, it could be used in supporting student learning and in facilitating the early diagnosis of learning difficulties. In Study IV, 91 student teachers participated in a pre-test/post-test design where they answered open-ended questions about a complex science concept both before and after reading either a traditional, expository science text or a refutational text that prompted the reader to change his/her beliefs according to scientific beliefs about the phenomenon. The student teachers completed a questionnaire concerning their regulation and processing strategies. The results showed that the students’ understanding improved after text reading intervention and that refutational text promoted understanding better than the traditional text. Additionally, regulation and processing strategies were found to be connected with understanding the science phenomenon. A weak trend showed that weaker learners would benefit more from the refutational text. It seems that learners with effective learning strategies are able to pick out the relevant content regardless of the text type, whereas weaker learners might benefit from refutational parts that contrast the most typical misconceptions with scientific views. The purpose of Study V was to use eye tracking to determine how third-year medical studets (n = 39) and internal medicine residents (n = 13) read and solve patient case texts. The results revealed differences between medical students and residents in processing patient case texts; compared to the students, the residents were more accurate in their diagnoses and processed the texts significantly faster and with a lower number of fixations. Different reading patterns were also found. The observed differences between medical students and residents in processing patient case texts could be used in medical education to model expert reasoning and to teach how a good medical text should be constructed. The main findings of the thesis indicate that even among very selected student populations, such as high-achieving medical students or student teachers, there seems to be a lot of variation in regulation strategies of learning and text processing. As these learning strategies are related to successful studying, students enter educational programmes with rather different chances of managing and achieving success. Further, the ways of engaging in learning seldom centre on a single strategy or approach; rather, students seem to combine several strategies to a certain degree. Sometimes, it can be a matter of perspective of which way of learning can be considered best; therefore, the reality of studying in higher education is often more complicated than the simplistic view of self-regulation as a good quality and external regulation as a harmful quality. The beginning of university studies may be stressful for many, as the gap between high school and university studies is huge and those strategies that were adequate during high school might not work as well in higher education. Therefore, it is important to map students’ learning strategies and to encourage them to engage in using high-quality learning strategies from the beginning. Instead of separate courses on learning skills, the integration of these skills into course contents should be considered. Furthermore, learning complex scientific phenomena could be facilitated by paying attention to high-quality learning materials and texts and other support from the learning environment also in the university. Eye tracking seems to have great potential in evaluating performance and growing diagnostic expertise in text processing, although more research using texts as stimulus is needed. Both medical and teacher education programmes and the professions themselves are challenging in terms of their multidisciplinary nature and increasing amounts of information and therefore require good lifelong learning skills during the study period and later in work life.

Regulation of Spermatogenesis: Differentiation of GFP-labeled Stem Cells and the Function of Cytoplasmic Bridges

During spermatogenesis, different genes are expressed in a strictly coordinated fashion providing an excellent model to study cell differentiation. Recent identification of testis specific genes and the development of green fluorescence protein (GFP) transgene technology and an in vivo system for studying the differentiation of transplanted male germ cells in infertile testis has opened new possibilities for studying the male germ cell differentiation at molecular level. We have employed these techniques in combination with transillumination based stage recognition (Parvinen and Vanha-Perttula, 1972) and squash preparation techniques (Parvinen and Hecht, 1981) to study the regulation of male germ cell differentiation. By using transgenic mice expressing enhanced-(E)GFP as a marker we have studied the expression and hormonal regulation of beta-actin and acrosin proteins in the developmentally different living male germ cells. Beta-actin was demonstrated in all male germ cells, whereas acrosin was expressed only in late meiotic and in postmeiotic cells. Follicle stimulating hormone stimulated b-actin-EGFP expression at stages I-VI and enhanced the formation of microtubules in spermatids and this way reduced the size of the acrosomic system. When EGFP expressing spermatogonial stem cells were transplanted into infertile mouse testis differentiation and the synchronized development of male germ cells could be observed during six months observation time. Each colony developed independently and maintained typical stage-dependent cell associations. Furthermore, if more than two colonies were fused, each of them was adjusted to one stage and synchronized. By studying living spermatids we were able to demonstrate novel functions for Golgi complex and chromatoid body in material sharing between neighbor spermatids. Immunosytochemical analyses revealed a transport of haploid cell specific proteins in spermatids (TRA54 and Shippo1) and through the intercellular bridges (TRA54). Cytoskeleton inhibitor (nocodazole) demonstrated the importance of microtubules in material sharing between spermatids and in preserving the integrity of the chromatoid body. Golgi complex inhibitor, brefeldin A, revealed the great importance of Golgi complex i) in acrosomic system formation ii) TRA54 translation and in iii) granule trafficking between spermatids.