A beginner-friendly, intuition-first tutorial on the Augmented Synthetic Control Method (ASCM) for a single treated unit — estimating the effect of the 2012 Kansas tax cuts on GDP per capita with the augsynth package, from classic SCM to ridge augmentation, with a careful tour of four ways to do inference.
Extend synthetic difference-in-differences to staggered adoption, where units adopt treatment at different times, and apply it in Stata to parliamentary gender quotas across 119 countries — deriving the per-cohort estimator, its aggregation into the overall ATT, the modern sdid_event event study, and bootstrap, jackknife, and placebo inference.
Introduce and derive synthetic difference-in-differences, then apply it to California's Proposition 99 — comparing SDID with the original difference-in-differences and synthetic control (synth2), and how to run placebo inference with a single treated unit.
A hands-on tour of the Augmented Synthetic Control Method in a multi-country setting with the augsynth package — learning single_augsynth, multisynth, and augsynth_multiout on simulated data, then replicating Papaioannou (2021) on the EMU and productivity convergence.
When the 'treatment' is a point in space, distance becomes the running variable. We walk through the parametric ring DiD and a data-driven nonparametric alternative, first on a simulated world with a known answer, then on Linden and Rockoff's home-prices study, and reconcile a parametric −5.78 % with a nonparametric −20.6 %.
A case study on the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion --- working through 2x2 cell-means, TWFE, covariate-adjusted DRDID, 2xT and Callaway-Sant'Anna staggered event studies, and HonestDiD sensitivity --- to show how population weighting changes the target parameter when the units are regions of very different sizes.
Six estimators in one tutorial --- naive pre-post, DiD, two flavours of ITS, RDD on time, Synthetic Control, and CausalImpact --- all applied to California's 1988 Proposition 99 cigarette tax to see how much (and where) they disagree.
Replicate Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001) in Python with pyfixest and linearmodels: instrument modern institutions with settler mortality across 64 ex-colonies and learn how IV recovers a causal effect that OLS understates by 80 percent.
Replicate Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001) in Stata: instrument modern institutions with settler mortality across 64 ex-colonies and learn how IV recovers a causal effect that OLS understates by 80 percent.
Estimate heterogeneous causal effects of mining and mineral prices on economic development using EconML's CausalForestDML with Double Machine Learning, applied to simulated resource curse data