A beginner-friendly walkthrough of Double LASSO for causal inference, replicating Fitzgerald, Lattimore, Robinson and Zhu's (2026) analysis of the Donohue–Levitt abortion–crime question with 284 candidate controls and state-clustered standard errors.
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 %.
An introduction to regional impact evaluation using modern causal-inference methods with worked examples and publicly available data for full reproducibility.
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