Causal Effect

When making choices, individuals can follow alternative strategies or decision rules to the traditional compensatory utility maximization, raising doubts about to what extent these choices can be used to elicit preferences. In this paper we use a verbal protocol approach to investigate the use of alternative decision rules in discrete choice experiments. The main interest is to identify some of

We analyze longitudinal data from a demographic surveillance area (DSA) in KwaZulu-Natal to examine the impact of parental death on children’s outcomes. The results show significant differences in the impact of mothers’ and fathers’ deaths. The loss of a child’s mother is a strong predictor of poor schooling outcomes. Maternal orphans are significantly less likely to be enrolled in school and have completed significantly fewer years of schooling, conditional on age, than children whose mothers are alive. Less money is spent on maternal orphans’ educations, on average, conditional on enrollment. Moreover, children whose mothers have died appear to be at an educational disadvantage when compared with non-orphaned children with whom they live. We use the timing of mothers’ deaths relative to children’s educational shortfalls to argue that mothers’ deaths have a causal effect on children’s educations. The loss of a child’s father is a significant correlate of poor household socioeconomi...

The government’s report, Opportunity for All: Tackling Poverty and Social Exclusion (Department of Social Security, 1999), identified poor health as one of the major problems associated with low income. However, much of the available evidence on the relationship between income and health is of little help in forming policies to reduce health inequalities, as it has tended to be based

Criminological research has consistently uncovered a positive correlationbetween past and current criminal behavior. Continuity in offending overtime can be attributed to at least two processes—populationheterogeneity and state dependence. A population heterogeneity processattributes stability in offending over time to differences in ananti-social characteristic (self-control, impulsivity, psychopathicpersonality) across persons that is established early in life andtime-stable thereafter. An implication of a population heterogeneityexplanation for continuity in offending over time is that the anti-socialcharacteristic is likely to have reverberations throughout life, takingmany manifestations later in life (unemployment, drug addiction, maritalinstability). Any observed correlation between these later life events andcriminality, therefore, is spurious rather than causal, due to the factthat they are all the effects of a common cause. A state dependenceexplanation, in contrast, attributes observed stability in criminaloffending to a process of contagion. That is, criminal behavior has agenuine causal effect on subsequent criminality by eroding constraintsand strengthening incentives to crime. The implication of a statedependence process is that criminal conduct may be influenced by laterlife events. In this paper, we draw a connection between populationheterogeneity and state dependence processes and extant criminologicaltheory. We also review the literature that has investigated theplausibility of these two processes. Finally, concluding that weknow very little about them we make recommendations for future researchon population heterogeneity and state dependence.

Existing literature in the field of e-learning technology acceptance reflects a significant number of independent studies that primarily investigate the causal relationships proposed by technology acceptance theory, such as the technology acceptance model (TAM). To synthesize the existing knowledge in the field of e-learning technology acceptance, we have conducted a systematic literature review of 42 independent papers, mostly published in

MatchIt: Nonparametric Preprocessing for Parametric Casual Inference, 2005b. URL http://gking.harvard.edu/matchit. R package version – Ho, Imai, et al. ... Examining the impact of missing data on propensity score estimation in determining the effectiveness of self-...

En esta investigación se construye un listado de verificación (“checklist”) de características que permiten perfilar de forma diferenciada la manifestación de las distintas formas de Violencia Entre Parejas (VEP) en el hogar (Psicológica, Económica, Física y Sexual) que afectan a la mujer. Para ello, partiendo del Enfoque Ecológico de la Violencia (EEV) que establece que la VEP debe analizarse a partir de factores individuales, del hogar y de la sociedad, fueron estimados una serie de modelos probabilísticos. Dada la alta dimensionalidad del fenómeno analizado, fue necesario utilizar el estimador LASSO, el cual permitió realizar una selección de variables y con esto construir el “checklist”. Luego, con estas variables se construyó el Índice de Dominancia Relativa (IDR), el cual permite diseñar un ranking en base a la contribución que cada variable aporta a la varianza total, por tipo de VEP. Los resultados sugieren que las variables que más contribuyen son: la experiencia de haber sufrido violencia durante la adolescencia por parte de la mujer afectada y el cónyuge (violencia intergeneracional o transmisión vertical); el nivel violencia en el entorno comunitario (efecto contaminación de la comunidad o transmisión horizontal); y otras variables asociadas, como la frecuencia de matrimonio y uniones de la mujer, falta acceso a la de educación en el cónyuge, la diferencia de edad, entre otras. Finalmente, utilizando estrategias de “Machine Learning” para “Oversampling”, se estimaron los puntajes de probabilidad de padecer VEP por tipo de Violencia, a partir de la selección de variables arrojada por el estimador LASSO.

Changes in the terror alert level set by the Department of Homeland Security provide a shock to police presence in Washington, D.C. Using daily crime data during the period the terror alert system has been in place, we show that the level of crime decreases significantly, both statistically and economically, during high-alert periods. The decrease in the level of crime