Lecture 11 Kessler and Roth

Nick Huntington-Klein

2021-01-14

Difference-in-Differences

  • Today we’ll be going over Kessler & Roth (2014) and seeing how they do DID
  • This is the same paper used as a coding example in the textbook
  • There’s nothing particularly special about this paper - it’s not groundbreaking or famous
  • But it’s just a good example of how DID works in action

Discussion 1

  • What is the theoretical background of why they’re studying this?
  • Why do they think that an observational study might do a better job than the experiments in this case?
  • What has the previous literature found?

Discussion 2

  • How do they set up their DID? How do they define treatment and control?
  • What assumptions do they focus on and how do they justify them?
  • What causal diagram might they have in mind?

Discussion 3

  • What do they find?
  • How can we interpret each column of Table 2?
  • Is there anything else they should have done?
  • How do they make sense of their results in the conclusion?