This study assesses the effectiveness of Zakat as an alternative to microcredit in alleviating poverty in Bangladesh. Through the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) techniques, this study reveals that the impact of zakat scheme has proven higher than microcredit programs. Besides, this study also discloses that zakat scheme significantly increases both income and expenditure of the recipients in c...

We investigate the persistence of short-term effects of a high-quality school-based prekindergarten program in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We analyze third-grade reading and math scores for two cohorts of students eligible to participate in pre-kindergarten in 2000-01 and 2005-06, using boosted regression and propensity score matching to select a comparison group of local students who did not participate ...

A large literature concludes that Big N auditors provide higher audit quality than non-Big N auditors. An unresolved question, however, is whether self-selection drives this “Big N effect.” Most recently, a high profile study concludes that Propensity Score Matching (PSM) on client characteristics causes the Big N effect to disappear. We conjecture that this finding may be affected by PSM’s inh...

The present study was carried out in the rice-wheat area of Pakistani Punjab. The data for the study was collected from three main districts of central Punjab Province i.e. Gujranwala, Sheikhupura and Hafizabad. In total 234 farmers were interviewed. The impact of agricultural extension services was estimated on adoption of new improved technologies and crop yields. The propensity score matchin...

This paper investigates whether replacing a coach improves teams performance. We do so by using match-level team performance data and a propensity score matching triple difference estimator. As a control group we use the matches of teams that did not fire the coach but that share similar observable characteristics and an identical pre-firing performance history with those whose coach was fired....

There is widespread scientific and practical interest in estimating peer influence effects for a variety of behaviors, but peer influence effects are not identifiable in most observational data. Social scientists have thus had to remain largely silent on these effects — or make inconclusive or misleading arguments for their estimates of them. The state-of-the-art research has used propensity sc...

This paper measures the effect of dividend initiation announcements on firms’ stock returns using a propensity score matching approach. Unlike the traditional event study methodology, propensity score matching can reduce the bias in the estimation of dividend initiation effects by controlling for the existence of confounding factors. Consistent with previous studies, the results show that divid...

This study examines the effects of the Innovation Fund for Small and Medium Technology-based Firms (Innofund), one of the largest Chinese government programs that support corporate R&D activities on corporate innovation outputs. We study the general effects of Innofund on innovation. By exploring institutional variations over time and across regions, we also examine the effect of institutions o...

This study analyzed students who took STEM courses online or face-to-face at a large urban community college in the Northeastern U.S. to determine which course-level characteristics most strongly predicted higher rates of dropout or D/F grades in online STEM courses than would be expected in comparable face-to-face courses. While career and elective STEM courses had significantly higher success...

This paper discusses our work submitted to FIRE 2017 IRMiDis Track [3]. The goal was to extract actionable information from the micro-blogs i.e. tweets which can be leveraged to provide aid and help during disaster events. The two tasks addressed in this work are, first, extraction of useful information such as the need or availability of various resources and second, finding tweets that expres...