Climbing the ladder from difference-in-differences to synthetic difference-in-differences, one stage at a time, with every estimator hand-coded before it is run with its package. The case study is the 2016 Brexit referendum and what it cost UK GDP. Includes cheat sheets in R, Stata and Python.
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 beginner-friendly R replication of Lessmann (2014) on the spatial Kuznets curve — building the weighted coefficient of variation from simulated regional data, then estimating the inverted-U with cross-section OLS, two-way fixed effects in fixest, and the Robinson and Baltagi–Li semiparametric estimators.
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.
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.
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 %.
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.