· A new practitioners guide to difference-in-differences by Baker, Callaway, Cunningham, Goodman-Bacon and Sant’Anna is now out as a working paper. They illustrate issues around the use of weights, covariates, and staggered treatment timing through an applied example. They provide an eight-step “forward engineering” approach, which starts by defining the target parameters of interest, and then going through the steps needed to justify and estimate these parameters. They illustrate the use of doubly-robust approaches, and the paper will eventually include both R and Stata code to replicate everything.
· On VoxDev, Hanming Fang and co-authors use staggered DiD to show that “the expansion of high-speed rail connectivity accounted for up to one-third of the increase in electric vehicle market share and sales in China” – the argument is that the high-speed trains provide a reliable alternative for long-distance travel, so that consumers suffer less range anxiety and then are happy to buy electric vehicles to cover their shorter normal driving. I also learnt that there is now a VoxChina to provide summaries on research around China.
· Also on VoxDev, Simon Franklin summarizes his work on the demand for government housing using a housing lottery in Ethiopia where the government built housing on the fringes of the city – so slum dwellers would trade a central location for better housing quality further away: “Multiple follow-up surveys allow me to track how their housing choices, jobs, and social networks changed over time, up to eight years after they acquired their units…I find that more than 50% of lottery winners move in when they get the chance, a similar proportion still live there after eight years, while the other half rent them out…I find no substantial evidence of large positive or negative impacts on jobs, social networks, or children’s schooling outcomes. Most people adjust to longer commutes, either by keeping their existing work or finding employment nearer to their new homes. Over time, early drawbacks—such as weaker social ties—fade out, and the newly built areas evolve into cohesive communities with improved amenities.”
· Funding: IPA’s Peace and Recovery initiative has a call for proposals, with optional expressions of interest due April 25. The fund “supports rigorous impact evaluations, pilots, exploratory studies, evidence use and policy outreach support, and infrastructure and public goods projects to inform policies and programs related to the prevention of, responses to, and recovery from most forms of social and political violence as well as humanitarian emergencies”
· A free online development economics course for students from African and Asian countries is being run by the IZA/FCDO Programme on Gender, Growth and Labor Markets in Low-Income Countries, with lectures by LSE professors Oriana Bandiera and Robin Burgess. Applications for the course are due April 21.
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