Download or read book Essays on Causal Inference in Observational Studies written by Alexis J. Diamond and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third essay investigates the impact of United Nations peacekeeping following civil war. King and Zeng (2007) found that prior work on this topic (Doyle and Sambanis 2000) had been based more on indefensible modeling assumptions than on evidence. This essay revisits the Doyle and Sambanis (2000) causal questions and answers them using new matching-based methods. These new methods do not require assumptions that plagued prior work, and they are broadly applicable to many important inferential problems in political science and beyond. When the methods are applied to the Doyle and Sambanis (2000) data, there is a preponderance of evidence to suggest that UN peacekeeping has had a positive effect on peace and democracy in the aftermath of civil war.