The mobility of university students abroad is a phenomenon of great importance

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Purpose: Our research objective is to carry out an analysis of the motivations and specific decision factors of Brazilian university students who will travel to Spain to continue their studies. Design/methodology/approach: The applied methodology has been to conduct online surveys among members of the Brazilian student community in Spain. For the design of the survey, we started with a previous exploratory study with in-depth individual interviews. The interviews were conducted based on a semi-structured questionnaire inspired by the previous literature.Findings: The comparison between the previous studies in the literature and the results of the survey shows that the factors “Academic level of the center” and “Prestige and prospects” of having studied abroad coincide with one another. Indeed, these factors are among the most significant in almost all of the studies and have also been highlighted by the respondents, confirming the importance of these factors in their decision to study abroad. On the other hand, the rest of the factors that appear to be the most relevant in the survey results are specific to and characterize the flow of students analyzed. Specifically, they concern the international experience, scholarships, image and culture of the country and the language.Research limitations/implications: The sample is limited, due to the difficulty of contacting this type of subject, which made it necessary for the researchers to adopt various approach strategies.Practical implications: The results obtained can benefit the recruitment of Brazilian students.Social implications: Contributes to knowledge of the emigration flows and relations between the two countries.Originality/value: The specific topic of Brazilian students in Spain has not been previously discussed.

In the residential sector, grid parity has been reached or is close to be reached in many countries, which means that the cost of electricity from residential photovoltaic installations is equal to or less than the retail electricity price. However, not all installations are equally profitable. The objective of this paper is to analyze the economic performance of residential self-consumption systems, particularly the effect of electric load profiles in regard to that performance. For this purpose, a simulation model is proposed to perform a comparative analysis of the profitability of different configurations of a grid-connected, residential solar system. The model is applied to several differentiated load profiles, as well as to different configurations of photovoltaic panels and batteries. The analysis shows the impact of different load profiles on self-consumption, autarchy and, ultimately, the grid parity of the installation. Keywords: Photovoltaic systems, grid connection, batteries, techno-economic simulation, load profiles, grid parity

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