This study used the propensity score method to investigate the effects of early adolescent romance in the 9th grade on academic performance, as measured by high school graduation and college enrollment. The study sample included 2,895 9th graders from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, 1997. Findings from the study uncovered mixed effects of early adolescent romance on student performanc...

Teachers and instructors assign students homework of varying lengths. There is considerable evidence that factors such as cognitive load play a role in student performance and learning, but there has not been sufficient study of how these phenomena play out in the specific case of the length of homework. In this paper, we study the impact of assignment size on student performance. This paper re...

This study seeks to address the mixed findings of prior studies regarding the effect of online brand community on customer value. Based on the regulatory focus theory, we hypothesize that participation in a brand community tend to increase both visit and purchase frequencies of customers with promotion-focus; on the contrary, the same would typically decrease visit and purchase frequencies of c...

Using recent data from the Chinese manufacturing industry and the generalised propensity score, this paper establishes economically significant causal effects of foreign acquisition on domestic and export markets dynamics. JEL classification: F23, G28, C24

This paper explores the effects of overseas activity on parent firm employment in a panel of Taiwan’s large, listed firms during 2000-2005. Propensity score matching estimates of discrete effects suggest that employment growth did not differ significantly between new parents and firms with no overseas operations. Generalized method of moments’ estimates of marginal effects for all firms indicat...

I provide a simple introduction to the use of propensity score reweighting to assess the effect of changes in covariates on the distribution of an outcome (such as wages). I relate this to the literature on estimating “average treatment effects” and Blinder/Oaxaca decompositions as well as discuss some of the limitations and uses of reweighting.

We analyze the wage effects of employment breaks of women entering motherhood using a novel within-firm matching approach where mothers’ wages upon return to the job are compared with those of their female colleagues. We investigate three different matching procedures: (1) exact matching on individual characteristics two years before birth, (2) propensity score matching and (3) a combined proce...

This paper studies the e¤ects of service o¤shoring on the level and skill composition of domestic employment, using a rich data set of Italian …rms and propensity score matching techniques. The results show that service o¤shoring has no e¤ect on the level of employment but changes its composition in favor of high skilled workers.

Empirical evidence from a set of land reform beneficiaries suggests that Zimbabwe’s land reform was successful: the internal rate of return to the land reform project is high, settlers accumulated substantial amounts of assets, and they increased their agricultural productivity substantially over time. This evidence contradicts the general notion that land reform was a failure, a notion support...