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Related papers: Synthetic Interventions

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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 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

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

Causal inference methods are widely applied in various decision-making domains such as precision medicine, optimal policy and economics. Central to causal inference is the treatment effect estimation of intervention strategies, such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Tri Dung Duong , Qian Li , Guandong Xu

Understanding the effect of a particular treatment or a policy pertains to many areas of interest, ranging from political economics, marketing to healthcare. In this paper, we develop a non-parametric algorithm for detecting the effects of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-24 Davide Viviano , Jelena Bradic

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…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-04-16 Liyang Sun , Eli Ben-Michael , Avi Feller

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…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-12-05 Guido W. Imbens , Davide Viviano

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

The synthetic control method is an empirical methodology forcausal inference using observational data. By observing thespread of COVID-19 throughout the world, we analyze the dataon the number of deaths and cases in different regions…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2020-09-29 Niloofar Bayat , Cody Morrin , Yuheng Wang , Vishal Misra

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

Consider the problem of determining the effect of a compound on a specific cell type. To answer this question, researchers traditionally need to run an experiment applying the drug of interest to that cell type. This approach is not…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-13 Chandler Squires , Dennis Shen , Anish Agarwal , Devavrat Shah , Caroline Uhler

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

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-24 Eli Ben-Michael , Avi Feller , Jesse Rothstein

In this paper, we adopt results in nonlinear time series analysis for causal inference in dynamical settings.~Our motivation is policy analysis with panel data, particularly through the use of "synthetic control" methods. These methods…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-03-03 Yi Ding , Panos Toulis

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

The problem of causal inference with panel data is a central econometric question. The following is a fundamental version of this problem: Let $M^*$ be a low rank matrix and $E$ be a zero-mean noise matrix. For a `treatment' matrix $Z$ with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-03 Vivek F. Farias , Andrew A. Li , Tianyi Peng

We develop new changes-in-changes (CIC) and distributional synthetic controls (DSC) types of methods when there exists group-level heterogeneity. For CIC, we allow individuals to belong to heterogeneous groups, extending Athey and Imbens…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-02-20 Songnian Chen , Junlong Feng

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

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 synthetic control method (SCM) estimates causal effects in panel data with a single-treated unit by constructing a counterfactual outcome as a weighted combination of untreated control units that matches the pre-treatment trajectory. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-13 Yuxin Wang , Dennis Frauen , Emil Javurek , Konstantin Hess , Yuchen Ma , Stefan Feuerriegel