USER_GUIDE.md

User Guide

Quick start

Open the App and verify SYNTHETIC DEMO in the source banner. The initial example uses Chile as the treated economy, Argentina, Peru and Uruguay as comparators, a life-expectancy indicator, and a fictional analytical break in 2016. The synthetic Chile shift is engineered for demonstration and has no historical meaning.

Country and time selection

Choose a treated country and check at least one other country. Two or more donors are required for synthetic control. For DiD, the analysis uses the mean of all selected donor values in each year and excludes a year if any chosen country lacks that observation. A minimum of three observed years before and after the break is required.

Live data

Press Load World Bank data after choosing an outcome. The browser sends a request to the World Bank API. Data load failures leave the old data unchanged with a visible error. If you change indicator while viewing live data, press Load World Bank data again. The application fetches one outcome indicator at a time to keep the request small.

Eight tabs

• Overview: treated-versus-control means and a research design summary.
• Time series: annually matched outcome series and the year-by-year contrast table.
• DiD: transparent pre/post contrast, slope gap, descriptive resampling range.
• Synthetic control: convex donor weights fitted to the pre-break years.
• Placebos: country-reassignment and fake historical break diagnostics.
• Data audit: observation counts, expected coverage and reporting gaps.
• Protocol: intervention description, external source, confounder checklist and notes.
• Export: CSV, Markdown report, and full JSON session.

Study sessions

Click Full session .json to download all records currently loaded, settings and protocol notes. Click Restore a prior session to import them back. Imported sessions are labeled IMPORTED DATA, even when they originated from World Bank data, since the browser cannot reauthenticate a previously downloaded JSON file.

Interpretation

The numbers are exploratory measures. The selection of countries, timing, confounding assumptions and actual policy treatment must be documented independently before any substantive impact interpretation. Read METHODOLOGY.md and RESEARCH_ETHICS.md.