Difference-in-Differences (DiD) training with Pedro H.C. Sant’Anna

From 25–27 September 2023, UNU-WIDER will be offering a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) training on its premises with Dr Pedro H.C. Sant’Anna. The training will be offered by invitation only to external participants from Helsinki Graduate School of Economics (HGSE) and our colleagues from Mozambique and South Africa.

DiD methods are widely used to answer what-if type of questions in economics, political science, and many other social and medical sciences. Although very popular, the last few years have seen a boom of new papers on DiD and related designs, making it challenging for practitioners to keep up with rapidly evolving best practices. The main goal of this course is to provide a fast track toward these best practices.

The course will consist of 10 hours of lectures spread over a week. The lectures will include the theoretical DiD developments and how to use them in practice. For the latter, we will have labs and will provide R and Stata scripts. Finally, to ensure that the participants are absorbing the material well, we will also hold 1-on-1 meetings. These meetings can be used to discuss participants’ own research, Q&A for the course material, or anything that benefits the UNU-WIDER, HGSE and the workshop community.

About the trainer

Dr Pedro H.C. Sant’Anna is presently an Associate Professor of Economics at Emory University, serving as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics.

His research interests revolve around Applied Econometrics, with a particular emphasis on Causal Inference. In recent years, he has concentrated on gaining a deeper understanding of and enhancing Difference-in-Differences methods.

Prior to his tenure at Emory, he held the position of Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University and served as a Principal Researcher in the Office of the Chief Economist at Microsoft. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, in 2015, and his BA in economics from Ibmec-MG, Brazil, in 2009.