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Related papers: Synthetic Controls with Staggered Adoption

200 papers

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 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

The purpose of this work is to transport the information from multiple randomized controlled trials to the target population where we only have the control group data. Previous works rely critically on the mean exchangeability assumption.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-29 Yuhang Zhang , Yue Liu , Zhihua Zhang

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

Matching promises transparent causal inferences for observational data, making it an intuitive approach for many applications. In practice, however, standard matching methods often perform poorly compared to modern approaches such as…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-11 Jonathan Che , Xiang Meng , Luke Miratrix

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-27 Achille Nazaret , Claudia Shi , David M. Blei

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

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

Causal inference with observational studies often relies on the assumptions of unconfoundedness and overlap of covariate distributions in different treatment groups. The overlap assumption is violated when some units have propensity scores…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-19 Shu Yang , Peng Ding

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

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

Although the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) is now widely applied, its most commonly-used inference method, placebo test, is often problematic, especially when the treatment is not uniquely assigned. This paper discuss the problems with the…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-12-03 Ziyan Zhang

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

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

We analyze the properties of the Synthetic Control (SC) and related estimators when the pre-treatment fit is imperfect. In this framework, we show that these estimators are generally biased if treatment assignment is correlated with…

Econometrics · Economics 2021-01-13 Bruno Ferman , Cristine Pinto

Imbalanced classification often causes standard training procedures to prioritize the majority class and perform poorly on rare but important cases. A classic and widely used remedy is to augment the minority class with synthetic samples,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Zhengchi Ma , Anru R. Zhang

Support vector machine (SVM) is one of the most popular classification algorithms in the machine learning literature. We demonstrate that SVM can be used to balance covariates and estimate average causal effects under the unconfoundedness…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-02 Alexander Tarr , Kosuke Imai

The paper investigates the weighted sum-rate maximization (WSRM) problem with latent interfering sources outside the known network, whose power allocation policy is hidden from and uncontrollable to optimization. The paper extends the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-01-25 Lei You

Both cluster randomized trials and quasi-experimental designs are used to evaluate the impact of health and social policies and interventions. Stepped-wedge cluster randomized trials randomize a staggered adoption approach, while recent…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-15 Haidong Lu , Gregg S. Gonsalves , Fan Li , Guanyu Tong , Lee Kennedy-Shaffer