A ground-up introduction to synthetic control in Python, built on the California Proposition 99 case study and climbing three stages: the classical simplex of Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller; a Bayesian horseshoe prior that lets the data rather than a constraint choose the donors; and the Bayesian spatial model of Sakaguchi and Tagawa, which drops SUTVA on the donor pool and asks who else was treated. Every equation is derived and mapped to the code that implements it, using the scspill and mlsynth libraries. The answer for California survives every relaxation. The claim that the donor pool was clean does not.
Spatial econometrics usually hands you the neighborhood map before you start. This tutorial estimates it from the data instead, using the estimateW package on 90 European NUTS-1 regions, 2001-2019.
A Python package of synthetic control models that drop SUTVA on the donor pool — the treatment is allowed to reach the controls, and every model reports two estimands: the effect on the treated unit, purged of contamination, and the spillover received by each donor.
A Python library to explore, analyze, and learn regional growth, convergence, and inequality — with explicit spatial methods, interactive Plotly figures and publication-quality tables, plus three no-code Streamlit apps (Explore, Analyze, Learn).
Do industrial parks raise local economic activity — and for whom? A beginner's staggered difference-in-differences evaluation of Ethiopian industrial parks in Python, replicating Huang, Wang & Xu (2026) on synthetic calibrated data: TWFE and an event study with pyfixest, the modern Sun-Abraham, Borusyak/Gardner and Callaway-Sant'Anna estimators plus a Goodman-Bacon decomposition with diff-diff, survey-weighted repeated-cross-section DiD on DHS household welfare and women's empowerment, and Conley spatial standard errors.
Evaluate the long-run economic impact of a localized natural disaster with causal inference in Python. A beginner's replication of Heger & Neumayer (2019) on the 2004 Aceh tsunami, using synthetic calibrated data: dynamic difference-in-differences with pyfixest, an event study with diff-diff, a night-lights dose-response, synthetic control with mlsynth, and Conley spatial 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 %.
A faithful Python tutorial on Li & Fotheringham (2026) — using a two-stage MGWFER algorithm to remove time-invariant spatial confounders from Multiscale GWR and recover both unbiased spatially varying slopes and intrinsic contextual effects from simulated panel data (225 units x 3 periods).