The Effect of Breastfeeding on Children’s Cognitive and Noncognitive Development This paper uses propensity score matching methods to investigate the relationship between breastfeeding and children’s cognitive and noncognitive development. We find that breastfeeding for four weeks is positively and statistically significantly associated with higher cognitive test scores, by around one tenth of ...

The aim is to assess the effect of imprisonment on rape myth acceptance. The research used a sample of male prisoners incarcerated for non-sexual crimes (n = 98) and a sample of males drawn from the general population (n = 160). Simple linear regression did not indicate a significant effect of incarceration on rape myth acceptance. After controlling for background covariates using propensity sc...

Observational studies draw inferences about the possible effect of a treatment on subjects, where the assignment of subjects into a treated group versus a control group is outside the control of the investigator. Let r1(x) be the response when a unit with covariates x receives the treatment (z = 1), and r0(x) be the response when that unit does not receive the treatment (z = 0). Then one is int...

CONTEXT Promoting a culture of teaching may encourage students to choose a surgical career. Teaching in a human factors (HF) curriculum, the nontechnical skills of surgery, is associated with surgeons' stronger identity as teachers and with clinical students' improved perception of surgery and satisfaction with the clerkship experience. OBJECTIVE To describe the effects of an HF curriculum on...

We are interested in estimating the average effect of a binary treatment on a scalar outcome. If assignment to the treatment is exogenous or unconfounded, that is, independent of the potential outcomes given covariates, biases associated with simple treatment-control average comparisons can be removed by adjusting for differences in the covariates. Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983) show that adjusting...