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Related papers: Synthetic Controls with Staggered Adoption

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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…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-21 Jizhou Liu , Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen , Carlos Varjão

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-21 Xu Shi , Kendrick Li , Wang Miao , Mengtong Hu , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

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

Synthetic control methods (SCMs) are a canonical approach used to estimate treatment effects from panel data in the internet economy. We shed light on a frequently overlooked but ubiquitous assumption made in SCMs of "overlap": a treated…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-02-26 Daniel Ngo , Keegan Harris , Anish Agarwal , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Zhiwei Steven Wu

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.…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-03-26 Shosei Sakaguchi , Hayato Tagawa

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

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

Mixed-frequency data, where variables are observed at different temporal resolutions, commonly occur in economic and financial studies. Classical synthetic control methods (SCM) are ill-suited for such data, often necessitating aggregation…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-13 Lu Zhang , Shijin Gong , Xinyu Zhang

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

We consider the asymptotic properties of the Synthetic Control (SC) estimator when both the number of pre-treatment periods and control units are large. If potential outcomes follow a linear factor model, we provide conditions under which…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-05-27 Bruno Ferman

Synthetic Control methods have recently gained considerable attention in applications with only one treated unit. Their popularity is partly based on the key insight that we can predict good synthetic counterfactuals for our treated unit.…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-07-15 Tzvetan Moev

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

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

We analyze the synthetic control (SC) method in panel data settings with many units. We assume the treatment assignment is based on unobserved heterogeneity and pre-treatment information, allowing for both strictly and sequentially…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-12-27 Dmitry Arkhangelsky , David Hirshberg

We introduce the inclusive synthetic control method (iSCM), a modification of synthetic control methods that includes units in the donor pool potentially affected, directly or indirectly, by an intervention. This method is ideal for…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-11-15 Roberta Di Stefano , Giovanni Mellace

Synthetic control (SC) methods have gained rapid popularity in economics recently, where they have been applied in the context of inferring the effects of treatments on standard continuous outcomes assuming linear input-output relations. In…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-19 Alicia Curth , Hoifung Poon , Aditya V. Nori , Javier González

Staggered treatment adoption arises in the evaluation of policy impact and implementation in many settings, including both randomized stepped-wedge trials and non-randomized quasi-experiments with panel data. In both settings, getting an…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-14 Lee Kennedy-Shaffer

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

This paper reinterprets the Synthetic Control (SC) framework through the lens of weighting philosophy, arguing that the contrast between traditional SC and Difference-in-Differences (DID) reflects two distinct modeling mindsets: sparse…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-31 Le Wang , Xin Xing , Youhui Ye

Baseline estimation is critical to Demand Response (DR) settlement in electricity markets, yet existing machine learning methods remain limited in predictive performance, while methodologies from causal inference and counterfactual…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jonas Sievers , Mardavij Roozbehani