Related papers: Regression to the Mean's Impact on the Synthetic C…
The synthetic control method (SCM) is a popular approach for estimating the impact of a treatment on a single unit in panel data settings. The "synthetic control" is a weighted average of control units that balances the treated unit's…
Staggered adoption of policies by different units at different times creates promising opportunities for observational causal inference. Estimation remains challenging, however, and common regression methods can give misleading results. A…
The synthetic control method (SCM) is a popular approach for estimating the impact of a treatment on a single unit with panel data. Two challenges arise with higher frequency data (e.g., monthly versus yearly): (1) achieving excellent…
A/B tests, also known as randomized controlled experiments (RCTs), are the gold standard for evaluating the impact of new policies, products, or decisions. However, these tests can be costly in terms of time and resources, potentially…
Matching is a widely used causal inference design that aims to approximate a randomized experiment using observational data by forming matched sets of treated and control units based on similarities in their covariates. Ideally, treated…
We investigate the optimal design of experimental studies that have pre-treatment outcome data available. The average treatment effect is estimated as the difference between the weighted average outcomes of the treated and control units. A…
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…
The synthetic control method (SCM) is widely used for causal inference with panel data, particularly when the number of treated units is small. It relies on the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA), ruling out spillover effects.…
This paper extends the literature on the theoretical properties of synthetic controls to the case of non-linear generative models, showing that the synthetic control estimator is generally biased in such settings. I derive a lower bound for…
Synthetic control (SC) methods are commonly used to estimate the treatment effect on a single treated unit in panel data settings. An SC is a weighted average of control units built to match the treated unit, with weights typically…
In a seminal paper Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller [2010] (ADH), see also Abadie and Gardeazabal [2003], Abadie et al. [2014], develop the synthetic control procedure for estimating the effect of a treatment, in the presence of a single…
The synthetic control method (SCM) allows estimating the causal effect of an intervention in settings where panel data on a small number of treated and control units are available. We show that the existing SCM, as well as its extensions,…
This paper studies inference on treatment effects in panel data settings with unobserved confounding. We model outcome variables through a factor model with random factors and loadings. Such factors and loadings may act as unobserved…
Synthetic control methods are widely used to estimate the treatment effect on a single treated unit in time-series settings. A common approach to estimate synthetic control weights is to regress the treated unit's pre-treatment outcome and…
Estimation and inference procedures for synthetic control methods often do not allow for the existence of spillover effects, which are plausible in many applications. In this paper, we consider estimation and inference for synthetic control…
Randomized clinical trials are the gold standard when estimating the average treatment effect. However, they are usually not a random sample from the real-world population because of the inclusion/exclusion rules. Meanwhile, observational…
The synthetic control method is a an econometric tool to evaluate causal effects when only one unit is treated. While initially aimed at evaluating the effect of large-scale macroeconomic changes with very few available control units, it…
We present a robust generalization of the synthetic control method for comparative case studies. Like the classical method, we present an algorithm to estimate the unobservable counterfactual of a treatment unit. A distinguishing feature of…
The synthetic control method (SCM) has become a popular tool for estimating causal effects in policy evaluation, where a single treated unit is observed, and a heterogeneous set of untreated units with pre- and post-policy change data are…
The synthetic control (SC) method is a popular approach for estimating treatment effects from observational panel data. It rests on a crucial assumption that we can write the treated unit as a linear combination of the untreated units. This…