R Finger
Biographic Data
| ID | 16429 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Finger |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Finger |
| SIGNATURE | FINGER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | ETH Zurich |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0634-5742 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 96 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Plant diversity to cope with increased drought risk in grasslands
Grasslands are essential for global milk and meat production. Climate change and growing frequency of extreme weather events are expected to increase variability in production. This study explores how plant diversity can act as natural insurance against drought risks in grasslands using theoretical model and simulation. Examining sown diversity from a portfolio perspective, we identify mechanisms underlying its insurance value, including the stat…
Policy mixes and major emission reductions in European agriculture
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture are a major driver of climate change. Although various policies have been implemented to reduce agricultural GHG emissions, there is limited understanding of the effectiveness of existing climate policies. Existing ex-post evaluations have mainly focused on establishing causal evidence for specific policies in isolation, potentially overlooking the interactions and combined effects of policy mixes. …
Pathways for biodiversity enhancement in German agricultural landscapes
Conserving biodiversity, especially in agricultural landscapes, is a major societal challenge. Broad scientific evidence exists on the impacts of single drivers on biodiversity, such as the intensification of agriculture. However, halting biodiversity decline requires a systemic understanding of the interactions between multiple drivers, which has hardly been achieved so far. Selecting Germany as a case study, the goal of our analysis is (i) to u…
Harnessing satellite data for the next generation of agri-environmental policies
Input taxes in agriculture
The use of crop diversification in agricultural yield insurance products
Evidence for promoting pesticide-free, non-organic cereal production
Quantifying the importance of farmers' behavioral factors in ex-ante assessments of policies supporting sustainable farming practices
Behavioral factors have been identified to determine farmers' uptake of the adoption of sustainable farming practices. However, the coherent consideration of empirically identified behavioral factors in ex-ante model-based policy assessments is still rare. This study presents an agent-based modelling framework that integrates empirical data on farmers' cognitive, social, and dispositional characteristics. Using this framework, we test and quantif…
Envisioning the future of agri-tourism in Ukraine
Agritourism is known to play a pivotal role when providing diversification of farm activities, making in such way for sustainable regional and local development. However, it should be stated that in Ukraine agritourism has not received proper attention in the pre-war and current period. This paper explores the landscape of agritourism in Ukraine across pre-war and current periods, assessing its potential for the country advancement. The research …
Participation in individual and collective agri-environmental schemes
Understanding the behavioural factors that influence farmers' intentions to participate in agri-environmental schemes is crucial for delivering sustainability in agricultural landscapes. Drawing on a qualitative synthesis approach, we seek to understand the underlying motivations behind farmers' decisions to engage with individual as well as collective agri-environmental schemes. We systematically map qualitative evidence on behavioural factors i…
Citizens’ perceptions of agricultural policy goals—evidence from Switzerland
Agricultural policy goals should be legitimised by the population, as agriculture is an important recipient of governmental support in Europe. Questions arise as to how people assess these policy goals, which factors affect the perception of agricultural policy goals and to what extent cultural differences influence this assessment. We address these questions by conducting an online survey among 1,542 respondents in the German-, French- and Itali…
Europe needs better pesticide policies to reduce impacts on biodiversity
Current pesticide use in European agriculture has significant impacts on biodiversity. • This has cascading effects with potentially severe consequences to food security. • We observe a mismatch between pesticides’ externalities and policy decisions. • We highlight the urgency of implementing tangible and powerful policy measures now. • We outline pathways for better pesticide policies
How farmers’ self-identities affect agri-environmental transition in Grassland Use
Agri-environmental policies programmes mainly focus on economic incentives for the agri-environmental transition in grassland use. However, barriers rooted in farmers’ self-identities, which determine their behavioural intentions toward environmentally friendly practices, are often unaddressed in policy design. We conceptualise two self-identity gradients, productivist–multifunctionalist–conservationist and traditionalist–innovationist, to analys…
Exploring actors' perceptions of the precision agriculture innovation system – A Group Concept Mapping approach in Germany and Switzerland
Precision Agriculture Technologies (PATs) promise to enhance productivity and foster sustainability . However, attempts to explain the low adoption of PATs, particularly in Europe, lack attention to the role of shared understanding of PATs among actors in the development and diffusion of this innovation. To uncover what could guide the emergence of a collective understanding of PATs, we explore how the actors comprising the nascent innovation sys…
Agricultural systems and biodiversity
Countries' agricultural systems have an important impact on biodiversity, for example bird populations. Here, we estimate such impacts by exploiting a natural experiment in the middle of Europe, where there is a naturally homogenous area that is divided into three countries: Switzerland, Germany, and France. These countries have markedly different agricultural systems and policies. Using a methodologically unified and unusually rich bird dataset …
Effects of the debate on glyphosate's carcinogenic risk on pesticide producers' share prices
A behavioural agent-based modelling approach for the ex-ante assessment of policies supporting precision agriculture
National organic action plans and organic farmland area growth in Europe
The expansion of organic agricultural production methods has been tendered as a critical factor in the development of a sustainable global food system. The European Union has led efforts to expand organic farming, with a current target share of 25% organic farmland area by 2030 through the Farm-to-Fork strategy. Many member states have set organic area targets through the initiation of organic action plans, but systematic, quantitative, empirical…
Culture and agricultural biodiversity conservation
Farmers’ behavior towards sustainable agricultural production is key to reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture and conserving biodiversity. We investigate the causal effect of culture on pro-environmental behaviors of farmers, and how policy instruments interact with culture to influence behavior. We exploit a unique natural experiment in Switzerland, which consists of two parts. First, there is an inner-Swiss cultural border between…
Barriers to evidence use for sustainability
Calls for supporting sustainability through more and better research rest on an incomplete understanding of scientific evidence use. We argue that a variety of barriers to a transformative impact of evidence arises from diverse actor motivations within different stages of evidence use. We abductively specify this variety in policy and practice arenas for three actor motivations (truth-seeking, sense-making, and utility-maximizing) and five stages…
The politics of enabling tipping points for sustainable development
The adoption of pesticide-free wheat production and farmers' perceptions of its environmental and health effects
The reduction of pesticide use is a prime issue on policy agendas worldwide. However, existing policies often fail to promote widespread adoption of low-pesticide or no-pesticide production practices. Therefore, in order to overcome this obstacle, it is important to understand why farmers hesitate to use more sustainable pest management. To this end, we investigate the relationship between farmers' perception of the adverse environmental and huma…
National leverage points to reduce global pesticide pollution
There is an urgent need to reduce the environmental risk of pesticide pollution worldwide. We here explore national leverage points, using a novel dataset of 21.4 million georeferenced grid cells and a spatial regression discontinuity design. Our analysis lets us separate how much cross-country differences in the risk of pesticide pollution are caused by differences in countries’ agricultural systems and policies and how much is explained by othe…
Temperature effects on crop yields in heat index insurance
Heat can cause substantial yield losses in crop production and climate change is increasing the risk of this kind of damage. Weather index insurance can help to reduce the financial losses resulting from heat exposure. This paper introduces crop-specific payout functions based on restricted cubic splines in heat index insurance. The use of restricted cubic splines is a cutting-edge method to reflect empirically estimated temperature effects on cr…
Extreme weather events cause significant crop yield losses at the farm level in German agriculture
Extreme weather events frequently cause severe crop yield losses, affecting food security and farmers’ incomes. In this paper, we aim to provide a holistic assessment of these impacts across various extreme weather events and multiple crops. More specifically, we estimate and compare the impact of frost, heat, drought and waterlogging on yields of winter wheat, winter barley, winter rapeseed and grain maize production in Germany. We analyse 423,8…
Agricultural policy in the era of digitalisation
Digitalisation in the agricultural sector continues to expand. At the same time demands for an agricultural policy offering better support for sustainability become increasingly fervent. However, it is far from clear how digitalisation could make agricultural policy more effective in reducing undesired impacts and enhancing the benefits of farming. This article investigates the extent to which digital technologies can trigger different choices of…
Does it matter who advises farmers? Pest management choices with public and private extension
Does it matter whether farmers receive advice on pest management strategies from public or from private (pesticide company affiliated) extension services? We use survey data from 733 Swiss fruit growers who are currently contending with an infestation by an invasive pest, the fruit fly Drosophila Suzukii. We find that farmers who are advised by public extension services are more likely (+9–10%) to use preventive measures (e.g. nets) while farmers…
Determinants of farm diversification in the Netherlands
Conservation Costs Drive Enrolment in Agglomeration Bonus Scheme
Risk perceptions, preferences and management strategies
We analyze the factors affecting farmers’ choice accounting for farm, farmer, and household characteristics as well as elicited risk perception and risk preferences. We consider three alternative hypothetical methods for assessing risk preferences to test the stability and behavioral validity of them. Our case study focuses on livestock farmers in the German region North Rhine-Westphalia. We find that risk preferences are context depending, i.e. …
Culture and agricultural biodiversity conservation
Farmers’ behavior towards sustainable agricultural production is key to reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture and conserving biodiversity. We investigate the causal effect of culture on pro-environmental behaviors of farmers, and how policy instruments interact with culture to influence behavior. We exploit a unique natural experiment in Switzerland, which consists of two parts. First, there is an inner-Swiss cultural border between…
Pesticide-free but not organic
The sustainable intensification of agriculture requires solutions for a large-scale reduction of pesticide use while sustaining agricultural yields. Pesticide-free production standards, which bring together the strengths of all the food value chain actors, could be a cornerstone of this transformation. In Switzerland, a non-organic, private–public standard for pesticide-free wheat production is currently being introduced by the producer organizat…
Countries and the global rate of soil erosion
The impact of climate and price risks on agricultural land use and crop management decisions
Participation in individual and collective agri-environmental schemes
Understanding the behavioural factors that influence farmers' intentions to participate in agri-environmental schemes is crucial for delivering sustainability in agricultural landscapes. Drawing on a qualitative synthesis approach, we seek to understand the underlying motivations behind farmers' decisions to engage with individual as well as collective agri-environmental schemes. We systematically map qualitative evidence on behavioural factors i…
Barriers to evidence use for sustainability
Calls for supporting sustainability through more and better research rest on an incomplete understanding of scientific evidence use. We argue that a variety of barriers to a transformative impact of evidence arises from diverse actor motivations within different stages of evidence use. We abductively specify this variety in policy and practice arenas for three actor motivations (truth-seeking, sense-making, and utility-maximizing) and five stages…
Cooperative Management of a Traditional Irrigation System in the Swiss Alps
Traditional channel irrigation systems in Switzerland are managed on a community basis and have high cultural, touristic and ecological values. However, many irrigation communities disappeared in the last decades. This paper analyzes the factors contributing to the continuation of a still existent irrigation community. Our analysis thus provides insights into how to avoid further losses of these unique agricultural systems and to preserve the ass…
Evidence of slowing yield growth – The example of Swiss cereal yields
Citizens’ perceptions of agricultural policy goals—evidence from Switzerland
Agricultural policy goals should be legitimised by the population, as agriculture is an important recipient of governmental support in Europe. Questions arise as to how people assess these policy goals, which factors affect the perception of agricultural policy goals and to what extent cultural differences influence this assessment. We address these questions by conducting an online survey among 1,542 respondents in the German-, French- and Itali…
National leverage points to reduce global pesticide pollution
There is an urgent need to reduce the environmental risk of pesticide pollution worldwide. We here explore national leverage points, using a novel dataset of 21.4 million georeferenced grid cells and a spatial regression discontinuity design. Our analysis lets us separate how much cross-country differences in the risk of pesticide pollution are caused by differences in countries’ agricultural systems and policies and how much is explained by othe…
Farmers’ adoption of extensive wheat production – Determinants and implications
Evidence for promoting pesticide-free, non-organic cereal production
Europe needs better pesticide policies to reduce impacts on biodiversity
Current pesticide use in European agriculture has significant impacts on biodiversity. • This has cascading effects with potentially severe consequences to food security. • We observe a mismatch between pesticides’ externalities and policy decisions. • We highlight the urgency of implementing tangible and powerful policy measures now. • We outline pathways for better pesticide policies
How farmers’ self-identities affect agri-environmental transition in Grassland Use
Agri-environmental policies programmes mainly focus on economic incentives for the agri-environmental transition in grassland use. However, barriers rooted in farmers’ self-identities, which determine their behavioural intentions toward environmentally friendly practices, are often unaddressed in policy design. We conceptualise two self-identity gradients, productivist–multifunctionalist–conservationist and traditionalist–innovationist, to analys…
Temperature effects on crop yields in heat index insurance
Heat can cause substantial yield losses in crop production and climate change is increasing the risk of this kind of damage. Weather index insurance can help to reduce the financial losses resulting from heat exposure. This paper introduces crop-specific payout functions based on restricted cubic splines in heat index insurance. The use of restricted cubic splines is a cutting-edge method to reflect empirically estimated temperature effects on cr…
Extreme weather events cause significant crop yield losses at the farm level in German agriculture
Extreme weather events frequently cause severe crop yield losses, affecting food security and farmers’ incomes. In this paper, we aim to provide a holistic assessment of these impacts across various extreme weather events and multiple crops. More specifically, we estimate and compare the impact of frost, heat, drought and waterlogging on yields of winter wheat, winter barley, winter rapeseed and grain maize production in Germany. We analyse 423,8…
Beyond the single farm – A spatial econometric analysis of spill-overs in farm diversification in the Netherlands
Farm diversification is an important component of rural development and policy in Europe. We examine the influence of neighbouring farms on farm diversification decisions. Our analysis investigates spill-over effects between farms and different activities in a spatial econometric framework. Using census data from about 66,000 farms in the Netherlands, we find significant correlations of diversification activities between spatially proximate farms…
Economic benefits from plant species diversity in intensively managed grasslands
Modelling the Effects of a Glyphosate Ban on Weed Management in Silage Maize Production
Interaction effects of targeted agri-environmental payments on non-marketed goods and services under climate change in a mountain region
Communitywide shigellosis
OBJECTIVES. The study's objectives were to assess (1) control of a community outbreak of shigellosis through the promotion of handwashing, (2) risk factors in day-care centers, and (3) shigellosis attributable to attendance at a day-care center. METHODS. In 1991, an outbreak of Shigella sonnei infections occurred in Lexington-Fayette County, Ky; 14 licensed child day-care centers were involved. Communitywide promotion of hand washing was institut…
Evidence of slowing yield growth – The example of Swiss cereal yields
The impact of climate and price risks on agricultural land use and crop management decisions
Farmers’ adoption of extensive wheat production – Determinants and implications
Cooperative Management of a Traditional Irrigation System in the Swiss Alps
Traditional channel irrigation systems in Switzerland are managed on a community basis and have high cultural, touristic and ecological values. However, many irrigation communities disappeared in the last decades. This paper analyzes the factors contributing to the continuation of a still existent irrigation community. Our analysis thus provides insights into how to avoid further losses of these unique agricultural systems and to preserve the ass…
An ecological economic assessment of risk-reducing effects of species diversity in managed grasslands
Factors affecting farm growth intentions of family farms in mountain regions
Determinants of farm diversification in the Netherlands
Can Gridded Precipitation Data and Phenological Observations Reduce Basis Risk of Weather Index–Based Insurance
Adverse weather events occurring at sensitive stages of plant growth can cause substantial yield losses in crop production. Agricultural insurance schemes can help farmers to protect their income against downside risks. While traditional indemnity-based insurance schemes need governmental support to overcome market failure caused by asymmetric information problems, weather index–based insurance (WII) products represent a promising alternative. In…
Revisiting Pesticide Taxation Schemes
Risk perceptions, preferences and management strategies
We analyze the factors affecting farmers’ choice accounting for farm, farmer, and household characteristics as well as elicited risk perception and risk preferences. We consider three alternative hypothetical methods for assessing risk preferences to test the stability and behavioral validity of them. Our case study focuses on livestock farmers in the German region North Rhine-Westphalia. We find that risk preferences are context depending, i.e. …
Modelling the Effects of a Glyphosate Ban on Weed Management in Silage Maize Production
Interaction effects of targeted agri-environmental payments on non-marketed goods and services under climate change in a mountain region
A framework to assess the resilience of farming systems
Agricultural systems in Europe face accumulating economic, ecological and societal challenges, raising concerns about their resilience to shocks and stresses. These resilience issues need to be addressed with a focus on the regional context in which farming systems operate because farms, farmers' organizations, service suppliers and supply chain actors are embedded in local environments and functions of agriculture . We define resilience of a far…
Countries and the global rate of soil erosion
Economic benefits from plant species diversity in intensively managed grasslands
Effects of drought on hay and feed grain prices
Droughts represent a severe and increasing risk for the livestock sector as they can reduce yields of hay and feed grain. Droughts are predicted to increase in frequency and magnitude under climate change. Here we estimate the so far unexplored effect of drought shocks on feed prices. We use an empirical example from Germany and focus on the prices of hay as well as feed wheat and barley. Our results show that regional and national droughts subst…
No perfect storm for crop yield failure in Germany
Large-scale crop yield failures are increasingly associated with food price spikes and food insecurity and are a large source of income risk for farmers. While the evidence linking extreme weather to yield failures is clear, consensus on the broader set of weather drivers and conditions responsible for recent yield failures is lacking. We investigate this for the case of four major crops in Germany over the past 20 years using a combination of ma…
Tracking societal concerns on pesticides – a Google Trends analysis
We analyze public interest in pesticides and plant protection products over time utilizing Google Trends data for Switzerland from 2011 until 2019. We find that the aggregated public interest in pesticides and plant protection products has increased substantially in recent years, especially since 2017. This trend can be attributed to search terms related to pesticides, while the interest in search terms related to plant protection products remain…
Does it matter who advises farmers? Pest management choices with public and private extension
Does it matter whether farmers receive advice on pest management strategies from public or from private (pesticide company affiliated) extension services? We use survey data from 733 Swiss fruit growers who are currently contending with an infestation by an invasive pest, the fruit fly Drosophila Suzukii. We find that farmers who are advised by public extension services are more likely (+9–10%) to use preventive measures (e.g. nets) while farmers…
Beyond the single farm – A spatial econometric analysis of spill-overs in farm diversification in the Netherlands
Farm diversification is an important component of rural development and policy in Europe. We examine the influence of neighbouring farms on farm diversification decisions. Our analysis investigates spill-over effects between farms and different activities in a spatial econometric framework. Using census data from about 66,000 farms in the Netherlands, we find significant correlations of diversification activities between spatially proximate farms…
The costs of diversity
Globally, we face a dramatic biodiversity loss in agricultural systems as well as severe ecosystem degradation. In grasslands, higher biodiversity in terms of plant diversity was shown to increase the diversity of higher trophic levels and provide benefits for farmers such as higher and more stable yields. However, we lack a systematic overview of costs for more diverse seed mixtures, which are an essential tool in maintaining and increasing plan…
Extreme lows of wheat production in Brazil
Wheat production in Brazil is insufficient to meet domestic demand and falls drastically in response to adverse climate events. Multiple, agro-climate-specific regression models, quantifying regional production variability, were combined to estimate national production based on past climate, cropping area, trend-corrected yield, and national commodity prices. Projections with five CMIP6 climate change models suggest extremes of low wheat producti…
Benefits of Increasing Information Accuracy in Variable Rate Technologies
Improvements in the sustainability of agricultural production depend essentially on advances in the efficient use of nitrogen. Precision farming promises solutions in this respect. Variable rate technologies allow the right quantities of fertilizer to be applied at the right place. This helps to both maintain yields and avoid nitrogen losses. However, these technologies are still not widely adopted, especially in small-scale farming systems. Rece…
The role of non-cognitive skills in farmers' adoption of climate change mitigation measures
Farmers' adoption of climate change mitigation measures is key to successfully reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. This article investigates the role of non-cognitive skills, namely self-efficacy and locus of control, in farmers' uptake of mitigation measures. The study is based on a combination of survey and census data from 105 farmers in Switzerland. Almost all farmers in our sample already adopt some of the considered measures to re…
Economics (42 works) · Business (37 works) · Agriculture (35 works) · Geography (31 works) · Environmental Science (22 works) · Ecology (21 works) · Agricultural Innovations and Practices (19 works) · Agricultural economics (18 works) · Biology (18 works) · Agricultural Economics and Policy (14 works)