Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Using a unique reform in the Spanish financial aid program, I estimate the impact of need-based grants on student achievement and dropout decisions under different intensities of academic requirements. Utilising comprehensive administrative data from a large university, I exploit sharp discontinuities in the grant eligibility formula to identify the effect of aid on student outcomes. I find that aid eligibility has no effect on student outcomes when the academic requirements are comparable with most existing national grant schemes worldwide. In contrast, I find that need-based grants have strong positive impacts on student performance and degree completion when they are combined with more demanding academic requirements.

National financial aid programs for disadvantaged students cover a significant fraction of college students and represent a non-negligible component of the public budget. These programs often have relatively weak academic requirements for renewal, potentially leading to moral hazard and efficiency losses. Using a reform in the Spanish need-based grant program in higher education, this paper tests the causal effect of receiving the same amount of grant under different intensities of academic requirements on student performance, degree completion, and student dropout. I use administrative micro-data on the universe of applicants to the grant in a large university. Exploiting sharp discontinuities in the grant eligibility formula, I find strong positive effects of being eligible for a grant on student performance when combined with demanding academic requirements, while there are no effects on student dropout. Students improve their final exam attendance rate, their average GPA in final exams, and their probability of completing the degree. They also reduce the fraction of subjects that they have to retake. The grant has no effects on student performance, degree completion, and student dropout when academic requirements are comparable to those set out by national need-based student aid programs around the world. These results suggest that academic requirements in the context of higher education financial aid can be an effective tool to help overcome moral hazard concerns and improve aid effectiveness.

National financial aid programs for disadvantaged students cover a significant fraction of college students and represent a non-negligible component of the public budget. These programs often have relatively weak academic requirements for renewal, potentially leading to moral hazard and efficiency losses. Using a reform in the Spanish need-based grant program in higher education, this paper tests the causal effect of receiving the same amount of grant under different intensities of academic requirements on student performance, degree completion, and student dropout. I use administrative micro-data on the universe of applicants to the grant in a large university. Exploiting sharp discontinuities in the grant eligibility formula, I find strong positive effects of being eligible for a grant on student performance when combined with demanding academic requirements, while there are no effects on student dropout. Students improve their final exam attendance rate, their average GPA in final exams, and their probability of completing the degree. They also reduce the fraction of subjects that they have to retake. The grant has no effects on student performance, degree completion, and student dropout when academic requirements are comparable to those set out by national need-based student aid programs around the world. These results suggest that academic requirements in the context of higher education financial aid can be an effective tool to help overcome moral hazard concerns and improve aid effectiveness.

National financial aid programs for disadvantaged students cover a significant fraction of college students and represent a non-negligible component of the public budget. These programs often have relatively weak academic requirements for renewal, potentially leading to moral hazard and efficiency losses. Using a reform in the Spanish need-based grant program in higher education, this paper tests the causal effect of receiving the same amount of grant under different intensities of academic requirements on student performance, degree completion, and student dropout. I use administrative micro-data on the universe of applicants to the grant in a large university. Exploiting sharp discontinuities in the grant eligibility formula, I find strong positive effects of being eligible for a grant on student performance when combined with demanding academic requirements, while there are no effects on student dropout. Students improve their final exam attendance rate, their average GPA in final exams, and their probability of completing the degree. They also reduce the fraction of subjects that they have to retake. The grant has no effects on student performance, degree completion, and student dropout when academic requirements are comparable to those set out by national need-based student aid programs around the world. These results suggest that academic requirements in the context of higher education financial aid can be an effective tool to help overcome moral hazard concerns and improve aid effectiveness.

National financial aid programs for disadvantaged students cover a significant fraction of college students and represent a non-negligible component of the public budget. These programs often have relatively weak academic requirements for renewal, potentially leading to moral hazard and efficiency losses. Using a reform in the Spanish need-based grant program in higher education, this paper tests the causal effect of receiving the same amount of grant under different intensities of academic requirements on student performance, degree completion, and student dropout. I use administrative micro-data on the universe of applicants to the grant in a large university. Exploiting sharp discontinuities in the grant eligibility formula, I find strong positive effects of being eligible for a grant on student performance when combined with demanding academic requirements, while there are no effects on student dropout. Students improve their final exam attendance rate, their average GPA in final exams, and their probability of completing the degree. They also reduce the fraction of subjects that they have to retake. The grant has no effects on student performance, degree completion, and student dropout when academic requirements are comparable to those set out by national need-based student aid programs around the world. These results suggest that academic requirements in the context of higher education financial aid can be an effective tool to help overcome moral hazard concerns and improve aid effectiveness.

[EN] This paper presents a three step methodology based on the use of chemical oriented models (MCR and CLS) for extracting out the chemical distribution maps (CDMs) from hyperspectral images, afterwards performing multivariate image analysis (MIA) on the CDMs, and !nally extracting 'channel' and textural features from the score images related to quality characteristics These features show complementary properties to those directly obtained from the CDMs, since they take advantage of their internal correlation structure. The approach has been successfully applied to the evaluation of homogeneity and cluster presence of API in a novel formulation developed to improve the dissolution of poorly soluble drugs. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ; Research in this study was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and FEDER funds from the European Union through grant DPI2011-28112-C04-02, and also by NSF-Engineering Research Center for Structured Organic Particulate Systems (ERC-SOPS, EEC-0540855) and the program NSF-Major Research Instrumentation grant 0821113. ; Prats-Montalbán, JM.; Jerez-Rozo, J.; Romanach, R.; Ferrer Riquelme, AJ. (2012). MIA and NIR Chemical Imaging for pharmaceutical product characterization. Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems. 117(117):240-249. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemolab.2012.04.002 ; S ; 240 ; 249 ; 117 ; 117

[EN] With the aim of understanding the flux distributions across a metabolic network, i.e. within living cells, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been proposed to obtain a set of orthogonal components (pathways) capturing most of the variance in the flux data. The problems with this method are (i) that no additional information can be included in the model, and (ii) that orthogonality imposes a hard constraint, not always reasonably. To overcome these drawbacks, here we propose to use a more flexible approach such as Multivariate Curve Resolution-Alternating Least Squares (MCR-ALS) to obtain this set of biological pathways through the network. By using this method, different constraints can be included in the model, and the same source of variability can be present in different pathways, which is reasonable from a biological standpoint. This work follows a methodology developed for Pichia pastoris cultures grown on different carbon sources, lately presented in González-Martínez et al. (2014). In this paper a different grey modelling approach, which aims to incorporate a priori knowledge through constraints on the modelling algorithms, is applied to the same case of study. The results of both models are compared to show their strengths and weaknesses. ; Research in this study was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and FEDER funds from the European Union through grants DPI2011-28112-C04-01 and DPI2011-28112-C04-02. The authors are also grateful to Biopolis SL for supporting this research. ; Folch-Fortuny, A.; Tortajada Serra, M.; Prats-Montalbán, JM.; Llaneras Estrada, F.; Picó Marco, JA.; Ferrer Riquelme, AJ. (2015). MCR-ALS on metabolic networks: Obtaining more meaningful pathways. Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems. 142:293-303. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemolab.2014.10.004 ; S ; 293 ; 303 ; 142