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This article extends the widely-used synthetic controls estimator for evaluating causal effects of policy changes to quantile functions. The proposed method provides a geometrically faithful estimate of the entire counterfactual quantile…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-01-03 Florian Gunsilius

Synthetic control (SC) methods have been widely applied to estimate the causal effect of large-scale interventions, e.g., the state-wide effect of a change in policy. The idea of synthetic controls is to approximate one unit's…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-15 Claudia Shi , Dhanya Sridhar , Vishal Misra , David M. Blei

We propose a generalization of the synthetic control and interventions methods to the setting with dynamic treatment effects. We consider the estimation of unit-specific treatment effects from panel data collected under a general treatment…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-10-03 Anish Agarwal , Sukjin Han , Dwaipayan Saha , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Haeyeon Yoon

The synthetic difference-in-differences method provides an efficient method to estimate a causal effect with a latent factor model. However, it relies on the use of panel data. This paper presents an adaptation of the synthetic…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-10-01 Yoann Morin

The optimal design of experiments typically involves solving an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, we aim to develop a globally convergent and practically efficient optimization algorithm. Specifically, we consider a…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-11-29 Yiping Lu , Jiajin Li , Lexing Ying , Jose Blanchet

Synthetic control methods often rely on matching pre-treatment characteristics (called predictors) of the treated unit. The choice of predictors and how they are weighted plays a key role in the performance and interpretability of synthetic…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-02 Jaume Vives-i-Bastida

We introduce a synthetic control methodology to study policies with staggered adoption. Many policies, such as the board gender diversity policies, are replicated by other policy setters at different time frames. Our method estimates the…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-11-18 Jianfei Cao , Shirley Lu , Hang Wu

We propose principled prediction intervals to quantify the uncertainty of a large class of synthetic control predictions (or estimators) in settings with staggered treatment adoption, offering precise non-asymptotic coverage probability…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-02-04 Matias D. Cattaneo , Yingjie Feng , Filippo Palomba , Rocio Titiunik

Synthetic control methods can produce misleading counterfactual predictions when outcome series contain unit-specific stochastic trends, a common feature of nonstationary macroeconomic data. Existing remedies, such as pre-filtering or…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-21 Ziyi Liu , Yiqing Xu

The synthetic control method estimates the causal effect by comparing the treated unit's outcomes to a weighted average of control units that closely match its pre-treatment outcomes, assuming the relationship between treated and control…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-07 Taehyeon Koo , Zijian Guo

The synthetic control method has become a widely popular tool to estimate causal effects with observational data. Despite this, inference for synthetic control methods remains challenging. Often, inferential results rely on linear factor…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-09 Ignacio Martinez , Jaume Vives-i-Bastida

The average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) in a staggered-adoption panel is estimated using an intercept-augmented synthetic-control (SCM) estimator. A weighted parallel trends plus an intercept shift, together with mild regularity…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-08 Michael Guggisberg

This paper discusses a practical approach that combines synthetic control with triple difference to address violations of the parallel trends assumption. By transforming triple difference into a DID structure, we can apply synthetic control…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-09-24 Castiel Chen Zhuang

To make informed policy recommendations from observational data, we must be able to discern true treatment effects from random noise and effects due to confounding. Difference-in-Difference techniques which match treated units to control…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-09-12 Nicholas Illenberger , Dylan S. Small , Pamela A. Shaw

A common approach to constructing a Synthetic Control unit is to fit on the outcome variable and covariates in pre-treatment time periods, but it has been shown by Ferman and Pinto (2019) that this approach does not provide asymptotic…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-03-07 Joseph Fry

In this short note, I outline conditions under which conditioning on Synthetic Control (SC) weights emulates a randomized control trial where the treatment status is independent of potential outcomes. Specifically, I demonstrate that if…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-04 Harsh Parikh

Understanding treatment effect heterogeneity has become increasingly important in many fields. In this paper we study distributions and quantiles of individual treatment effects to provide a more comprehensive and robust understanding of…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-31 Zhe Chen , Xinran Li

The synthetic control method offers a way to quantify the effect of an intervention using weighted averages of untreated units to approximate the counterfactual outcome that the treated unit(s) would have experienced in the absence of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-12 Matias D. Cattaneo , Yingjie Feng , Filippo Palomba , Rocio Titiunik

As an alternative to synthetic control, the distributional Synthetic Control (DSC) proposed by Gunsilius (2023) provides estimates for quantile treatment effect and thus enabling researchers to comprehensively understand the impact of…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-12 Lu Zhang , Xiaomeng Zhang , Xinyu Zhang

Synthetic control is a causal inference tool used to estimate the treatment effects of an intervention by creating synthetic counterfactual data. This approach combines measurements from other similar observations (i.e., donor pool ) to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Saeyoung Rho , Rachel Cummings , Vishal Misra