A careful introduction to mlsynth, the Python library that puts the whole family of single-treated-unit synthetic control estimators behind one configuration interface. We climb the ladder from difference-in-differences to synthetic difference-in-differences with one mlsynth class per stage, showing what every option does and where the defaults will quietly hand you a different estimator. The case study is the 2016 Brexit referendum and what it cost UK GDP.
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.
Reproducing Scott Cunningham's LaLonde test in Python — covariates rescue a difference-in-differences ATT only when they enter the control group's counterfactual trend, recovering the $1,794 experimental benchmark from a naive $3,621.
A comprehensive, beginner-friendly Python replication of Lessmann and Seidel (2017) — turning satellite nighttime lights into predicted regional GDP, building five population-weighted inequality indices from scratch, exploring the cross-country dynamics of regional inequality, and estimating the regional Kuznets curve, its determinants, and a Conley spatial-HAC robustness check with PyFixest.
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.
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.
How persistent is firm employment? Pooled OLS, fixed effects, Anderson-Hsiao IV, Arellano-Bond difference GMM, and Blundell-Bond system GMM on the classic 140-firm UK panel — and how the AR(2), Hansen, and instrument-collapse diagnostics separate the one defensible estimate from four seductive wrong ones.
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.
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.