This study examines the effects of the Innovation Fund for Small and Medium Technology-based Firms (Innofund), one of the largest Chinese government programs that support corporate R&D activities on corporate innovation outputs. We study the general effects of Innofund on innovation. By exploring institutional variations over time and across regions, we also examine the effect of institutions o...

This study analyzed students who took STEM courses online or face-to-face at a large urban community college in the Northeastern U.S. to determine which course-level characteristics most strongly predicted higher rates of dropout or D/F grades in online STEM courses than would be expected in comparable face-to-face courses. While career and elective STEM courses had significantly higher success...

This paper discusses our work submitted to FIRE 2017 IRMiDis Track [3]. The goal was to extract actionable information from the micro-blogs i.e. tweets which can be leveraged to provide aid and help during disaster events. The two tasks addressed in this work are, first, extraction of useful information such as the need or availability of various resources and second, finding tweets that expres...

This paper assesses UK innovation policy impact on a large, population weighted, sample of both service and manufacturing SMEs. By focussing on self-reported innovation the study achieves a wider coverage of the effects of SME innovation policy than possible with more traditional indicators. Propensity score matching indicates that SMEs receiving UK state support for innovation were more likely...

In this article, we develop new methods for estimating average treatment effects in observational studies, in settings with more than two treatment levels, assuming unconfoundedness given pretreatment variables. We emphasize propensity score subclassification and matching methods which have been among the most popular methods in the binary treatment literature. Whereas the literature has sugges...

In medical research logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards regression analysis, in which all the confounders are included as covariates, are often used to estimate an adjusted treatment effect in observational studies. In the last decade the method of propensity scores has been developed as an alternative adjustment method and many examples of applications can be found in the literatu...

More than 124 governmental entities concerned about suburban sprawl and farmland loss have implemented farmland preservation programs preserving 1.67 million acres at a cost of $3.723 billion. Yet little analysis on these programs’ effectiveness in slowing farmland loss has been conducted. Using a unique 50-year 269 county panel data set on preservation programs and farmland loss for six Mid-At...

We use propensity scores to evaluate the effect of Food Stamps on food insecurity, a measure of inadequate food supply. Data come from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort. Propensity scores offer an advantage over traditional linear regression methods because they address omitted variable bias associated with Food Stamp use by matching similarly situated treatment and con...

Skills shortages and skill mismatch are a pressing concern for policymakers in several developing countries, and in East Asia specifically. Providing on-the-job training can be an effective policy tool to shape the skills of the existent workforce to the specific needs of the firms. This paper explores a unique data set of matched employer-employee data for Malaysia and Thailand to estimate the...

The internal validity of an observational study is enhanced by only comparing sets of treated and control subjects which have sufficient overlap in their covariate distributions. Methods have been developed for defining the study population using propensity scores to ensure sufficient overlap. However, a study population defined by propensity scores is difficult for other investigators to under...