In June 1998 a 4.8-kilometre bridge over the Jamuna river connected 26 million isolated Bangladeshis to Dhaka and cut freight costs in half. This tutorial rebuilds the difference-in-differences evaluation of that bridge from the ground up in Python, using the Padma hinterland — a symmetric region left isolated by a river whose own bridge was not started until 2015 — as the comparison group. It teaches the 2x2 logic, parallel trends, two-way fixed effects, event studies and honest sensitivity analysis on satellite nighttime lights, then runs the same machinery over census employment shares, rice yields and a public-goods placebo. The two doubly robust estimators of the original paper are rebuilt by hand in NumPy and pushed through both diff-diff and pyfixest. All 122 published coefficients are audited side by side with the replication, and the defects found inside the shipped Stata package are documented in full.
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.
Reproduce the key findings of Kremer, Willis, and You (2021) to understand why unconditional convergence emerged since 2000 and how the convergence of growth correlates explains this shift