How much did the 2016 Brexit vote cost the economy of the United Kingdom? We build a look-alike United Kingdom from other rich countries, step by step through a ladder of increasingly flexible methods, and compare what each step says. This R tutorial includes cheat sheets for Stata and Python and an interactive app that runs in your web browser.
Do gender quotas raise the share of women in national parliaments? In Stata, we compare 9 countries that adopted quotas in different years with look-alike groups built from 110 countries without quotas, and find an average gain of about 8 percentage points that varies a lot across countries. The tutorial includes an interactive app that runs in your web browser.
Did the 1988 tobacco tax in California reduce smoking? In Stata, we compare three ways of building a comparison for California from other states, including a newer method that blends their strengths, and all three agree that cigarette sales fell, though by different amounts. It comes with an interactive app that runs in your web browser.
Stata companion to the R Double LASSO tutorial — same data, same five estimators, replicating the Belloni-Chernozhukov-Hansen 284-control extension of Donohue and Levitt's abortion-and-crime panel with pdslasso, rlasso, and cvlasso.
Do good institutions make countries richer? Following the 2001 study by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson in Stata, we use the death rates of early European settlers in 64 former colonies as a natural experiment, and find an effect much larger than a simple comparison suggests. The tutorial includes an interactive app that runs in your web browser.
Does mining make places richer or poorer, and does the answer depend on the quality of government? Using simulated data that mirrors a published study, we use machine learning in Stata to estimate how the effects of mining and mineral prices on development differ from place to place. The tutorial comes with an interactive app that runs in your web browser.
Does access to a workplace retirement savings plan help some households build more wealth than others? Instead of reporting one average effect, we use machine learning in Stata to estimate how the effect differs across households by income and other traits. The tutorial comes with an interactive app that runs in your web browser.
Are poorer countries catching up to richer ones? Using international income data, we test whether poorer countries grow faster and whether income gaps across the world are shrinking, and we see how the answer changed after 2000. This Stata tutorial comes with an interactive app that runs in your web browser.
Why have poor countries grown faster than rich ones since around 2000, after decades of falling behind? We reproduce a 2021 study by Kremer, Willis and You showing that the policies, institutions and schooling that predict growth have themselves become more alike across countries. This Stata tutorial comes with an interactive app that runs in your web browser.
Does smoking during pregnancy lower the birth weight of babies? Using data on about 4,600 births in Stata, we compare six ways of making smokers and nonsmokers comparable, and most of them agree on a harm of roughly 230 grams. It comes with an interactive app that runs in your web browser.