Does More Generous Student Aid Increase Enrolment Rates into Higher Education? Evaluating the German Student Aid Reform of 2001 Students from low-income families are eligible to student aid under the federal students’ financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) in Germany. We evaluate the effectiveness of a recent reform of student aid that substantially increased the amount received by eligible stude...

A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in macroeconomics. In diverse applications, natural experiments have been used to verify underlying assumptions of conventional models, quantify specific model parameters, and identify mechanisms that have major effects on macroeconomic quantities but are absent from conventional models. We discuss and compare the us...

We analyze the fertility and health effects resulting from the abolition of the Austrian baby bonus in January 1997. The abolition of the benefit was publicly announced about ten months in advance, creating the opportunity for prospective parents to (re-)schedule conceptions accordingly. We find robust evidence that, within the month before the abolition, about 8% more children were born as a r...

THE CONNEXION BETWEEN OLD AND NEW APPROACHES TO FINANCIAL SATISFACTION by Bernard M.S.van Praag In this paper we compare the new satisfaction evaluation approach, developed in the nineties by Oswald ,Clark , Blanchflower and others with the older income evaluation (IEQ) approach, developed by Van Praag and Kapteyn in the seventies of the previous century. We find that both approaches yield stri...

Williams, Justin A. Ph.D., Purdue University, December 2013. Biophysical Studies of Cholesterol in Unsaturated Phospholipid Model Membranes. Major Professor: Stephen R. Wassall. Cellular membranes contain a staggering diversity of lipids. The lipids are heterogeneously distributed to create regions, or domains, whose physical properties differ from the bulk membrane and play an essential role i...

Colonization by the commensal Escherichia coli strain A0 34/86 (O83 : K24 : H31) has proved to be safe and efficient in the prophylaxis and treatment of nosocomial infections and diarrhoea of preterm and newborn infants in Czech paediatric clinics over the past three decades. In searching for traits contributing to this beneficial effect related to the gut colonization capacity of the strain, t...

_____________________________________________________________________ We ask whether the objective of egalitarian allocation of a merit good could be achieved by making the good available at multiple outlets charging different money and time prices. Differential pricing could separate high and low wage buyers across outlets, and proportional allocation of supply could ensure that consumption is...

The golden-striped salamander is a streamside species endemic to the northwestern corner of Iberian Peninsula. In first half twentieth century, an undisclosed number individuals this were reportedly captured in Buçaco, Central Portugal, and deliberately introduced Sintra Mountains, 170 km south its native distribution range. discovery breeding population during 2015 prompted work: we used neutr...