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...

Currently available asymptotic results in the literature suggest that matching estimators have higher variance than reweighting estimators. The extant literature comparing the finite sample properties of matching to specific reweighting estimators, however, has concluded that reweighting performs far worse than even the simplest matching estimator. We resolve these puzzling conclusions. Specifi...

Spending on big-time college athletics is often justified on the grounds that athletic success attracts students and raises donations. We exploit data on bookmaker spreads to estimate the probability of winning each game for college football teams. We then condition on these probabilities using a propensity score design to estimate the effects of winning on donations, applications, and enrollme...

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.

With growing economic globalization, returnee managers who have obtained education or work experience overseas play a much more crucial role in corporations, especially in emerging economies. Using hand-collected managerial background data from a sample of firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2010 to 2014, this paper investigates the impact of returnee managers on corp...

Two concerns in US education are shortages of qualified math and science teachers and the feminization of teaching. I draw on the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to identify a common reason for the two phenomena. Controlling for self-selection by a propensity score matching estimator and the Heckit, I find that the rigid pay structure for teachers, rather than the pay level, appea...

Propensity score applications are often used to evaluate educational program impact. However, various options are available to estimate both propensity scores and construct comparison groups. This study used a student achievement dataset with commonly available covariates to compare different propensity scoring estimation methods (logistic regression, boosted regression, and Bayesian logistic r...

Matching on the propensity score is widely used to estimate the effect of an exposure in observational studies. However, the quality of the matches can be affected by decisions made during the matching process, particularly the order in which subjects are selected for matching and the maximum permitted difference between matched subjects (the "caliper"). This study used simulations to explore t...

Each year an estimated two million children in the United States repeat a grade. Investing an additional year in the same grade is expected to help a child to acquire the academic skills she lacks. This, in turn, would help her to be successful in higher grades. In spite of its popularity, grade retention remains a highly controversial practice. A majority of researchers find that, for the repe...