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.
Extend synthetic difference-in-differences to staggered adoption, where units adopt treatment at different times, and apply it in Stata to parliamentary gender quotas across 119 countries — deriving the per-cohort estimator, its aggregation into the overall ATT, the modern sdid_event event study, and bootstrap, jackknife, and placebo inference.
Introduce and derive synthetic difference-in-differences, then apply it to California's Proposition 99 — comparing SDID with the original difference-in-differences and synthetic control (synth2), and how to run placebo inference with a single treated unit.
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.
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.
A beginner-friendly tutorial on the synthetic control method in R, using the Basque Country case study to estimate the economic cost of conflict on regional GDP per capita from 1970 to 1997.
Estimate the causal effect of California's Proposition 99 tobacco control program on cigarette sales using the synthetic control method in Stata, with in-space placebo, in-time placebo, and leave-one-out robustness tests