In this paper, we seek to evaluate the relative costs of debt for private versus comparable publicly traded rms. US studies of this important question have been limited due to the absence of comprehensive nancial data on privately-held rms. However, such data is available in the UK. Consequently, we employ a unique dataset of loans taken out by both types of UK rms with a large array of loan an...

The propensity score methods are widely used to adjust confounding effects in observational studies when comparing treatment effects. The propensity score is defined as the probability of treatment assignment conditioning on some observed baseline characteristics and it provides a balanced score for the treatment conditions as conditioning on the propensity score, the treatment groups are compa...

As labor market data is scarce in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), this paper uses household survey data to analyze the determinants of the gender gap in the labor market and its welfare implications for five SSA countries in multinomial logit models with propensity score matching method. The analysis confirms that education opens up opportunities for women to escape agricultural feminization and enga...

Propensity scores are increasingly being used in large sample studies to control for pregroup differences. Because these scores are often used to match cases, they can result in sample attrition. In smaller sample studies, such attrition leaves too few cases for meaningful analysis. Alternatives when working with small samples are to use propensity scores as covariates to control for pre-group ...

Propensity score matching is a tool for causal inference in non-randomized studies that allows for conditioning on large sets of covariates. The use of propensity scores in the social sciences is currently experiencing a tremendous increase; however it is far from a commonly used tool. One impediment towards a more wide-spread use of propensity score methods is the reliance on specialized softw...

At the household level, livestock plays a critical economic and social role in pastoralists and at the household level, livestock plays a critical economic and social role in pastoralists and smallholder farm households. The objectives of this study were to analyze factors affecting participation in cattle fattening and its impacts on household income in Fadis district of Eastern Hararghe. Both...