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Popular empirical strategies for policy evaluation in the panel data literature -- including difference-in-differences (DID), synthetic control (SC) methods, and their variants -- rely on key identifying assumptions that can be expressed…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-11-11 Yiqi Liu

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

We generalize the synthetic control (SC) method to a multiple-outcome framework, where the conventional pre-treatment time dimension is supplemented with the extra dimension of related outcomes in computing the SC weights. This…

General Economics · Economics 2024-07-29 Wei Tian , Seojeong Lee , Valentyn Panchenko

To infer the treatment effect for a single treated unit using panel data, synthetic control methods construct a linear combination of control units' outcomes that mimics the treated unit's pre-treatment outcome trajectory. This linear…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-07 Hongxiang Qiu , Xu Shi , Wang Miao , Edgar Dobriban , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Social scientists often study how a policy reform impacted a single targeted country. Increasingly, this is done with the synthetic control method (SCM). SCM models the country's counterfactual (non-reform or untreated) trajectory as a…

Applications · Statistics 2019-10-15 Elias Tuomaala

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

The synthetic controls (SC) methodology is a prominent tool for policy evaluation in panel data applications. Researchers commonly justify the SC framework with a low-rank matrix factor model that assumes the potential outcomes are…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-08-27 Anish Agarwal , Devavrat Shah , Dennis Shen

Synthetic control (SC) methods are widely used to estimate the effects of policy interventions, especially those targeting specific geographic regions, referred to as units. These methods construct a weighted combination of untreated units,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-04 Esteban Fernández-Morales , Arman Oganisian , Youjin Lee

The Synthetic Control method (SC) has become a valuable tool for estimating causal effects. Originally designed for single-treated unit scenarios, it has recently found applications in high-dimensional disaggregated settings with multiple…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-28 Ye Shen , Rui Song , Alberto Abadie

When evaluating the impact of a policy on a metric of interest, it may not be possible to conduct a randomized control trial. In settings where only observational data is available, Synthetic Control (SC) methods provide a popular…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-09-24 Muhummad Amjad , Vishal Misra , Devavrat Shah , Dennis Shen

This article studies experimental design in settings where the experimental units are large aggregate entities (e.g., markets), and only one or a small number of units can be exposed to the treatment. In such settings, randomization of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-24 Alberto Abadie , Jinglong Zhao

Difference-in-Differences (DiD) and Synthetic Control (SC) are widely used methods for causal inference in panel data, each with distinct strengths and limitations. We propose a novel method for short-panel causal inference that integrates…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-09-26 Yixiao Sun , Haitian Xie , Yuhang Zhang

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…

Econometrics · Economics 2017-11-21 Muhammad Jehangir Amjad , Devavrat Shah , Dennis Shen

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

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

Using observational data to estimate the effect of a treatment is a powerful tool for decision-making when randomized experiments are infeasible or costly. However, observational data often yields biased estimates of treatment effects,…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-01 Tobias Hatt , Stefan Feuerriegel

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-03 Shima Nassiri , Mohsen Bayati , Joe Cooprider

We consider estimation and inference on average treatment effects under unconfoundedness conditional on the realizations of the treatment variable and covariates. Given nonparametric smoothness and/or shape restrictions on the conditional…

Applications · Statistics 2022-10-04 Timothy B. Armstrong , Michal Kolesár

This paper addresses the problem of identifying and estimating the causal effect of a treatment in the presence of unmeasured confounding and various types of right-censoring. Examples of these censoring mechanisms are administrative…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-03-19 Ilias Willems , Sara Rutten , Gilles Crommen , Ingrid Van Keilegom

The synthetic control (SC) framework is widely used for observational causal inference with time-series panel data. SC has been successful in diverse applications, but existing methods typically treat the ordering of pre-intervention time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Saeyoung Rho , Cyrus Illick , Samhitha Narasipura , Alberto Abadie , Daniel Hsu , Vishal Misra