Since the seminal paper by Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983b) on propensity score analysis, research using propensity score analysis has grown exponentially over three decades. Nevertheless, some methodological and practical issues still remain unresolved. This introductory chapter describes these issues along with an introduction to basic concepts of propensity score analysis. The remaining chapters ...

Youth who switch schools are more likely to demonstrate a wide array of negative behavioral and educational outcomes, including dropping out of high school. However, whether switching schools actually puts youth at risk for dropout is uncertain, since youth who switch schools are similar to dropouts in their levels of prior school achievement and engagement, which suggests that switching school...

Using a novel dataset that allows us to trace the primary bank relationships of a sample of mostly unlisted firms, we explore to what extent foreign banks can improve the allocation of credit in emerging markets. Our results suggest that the limits of financial integration are less tight than what the previous literature based on a static picture of bank loan portfolios suggested. Foreign banks...

We examine the impact of primary school mergers on academic performance of students using a dataset that we collected using a survey designed specifically to examine changes in the academic performance of students before and after their schools were merged. We use difference-in-differences and propensity score matching approaches and demonstrate that overall the primary school merger has not ha...

To understand whether and how pre-trade transparency would affect over-the-counter markets, we construct a search model and test our model implications in corporate bond markets. Based on our search model, we argue that the increase in pre-trade information, which refines traders’ information sets, enhances traders’ bargaining positions relative to dealers’. Thus, traders’ transaction costs mea...

Observational learning and word-of-mouth are frequently confounded in online settings. Consumers purchase a product, enjoy it, and then refer others. In parallel, referral recipients observe a transmitter's interaction with the product and draw inferences about product quality. We aim to tease apart these effects using data on 42,000+ peer referrals at a leading crowdfunding platform. Our ident...

Evidence on whether people in shadow employment are there due to tax evasion reasons or because of the limited access to formal labour market is thus far mixed. Consistent with the first view, people with informal employment are actually experiencing higher wages than their formally employed counterparts’ ceteris paribus. Conversely, if barriers to access exist, one should expect “grey” wages t...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the impacts of medium and long term participation in microfinance programs. It utilises a new, large and unique panel dataset collected from treatment and control households from 1997 to 2005. The data enables us to identify continuing participants in the program as well as newcomers and leavers. We employ different estimation strategies including trip...

This paper deals with Chinese, English and Japanese multilingual information retrieval. Several merging strategies, including raw-score merging, round-robin merging, normalized-score merging, and normalizedby-top-k merging, were investigated. Experimental results show that centralized approach is better than distributed approach. In distributed approach, normalized-by-top-k with consideration o...

Social media has fundamentally changed our daily life and drawn many researchers’ attention to investigate the value and strategies of social media. Despite successful examples of social media marketing by firms in practice, there is little scholarly research that investigates whether individuals’ fan base in social media can be translated into real world monetary rewards. Also, most existing s...